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A Biographical Sketch of James Jensen

“It was the intention originally to summarize briefly the leading events in the life of James Jensen. Contrary to all expectations, the subject matter of this small volume grew beyond the limitations put upon it. The writer, believing that many of the events connected with this biography and belonging to the history of Forest Dale would be a source of interest to the people generally of the Ward, therefore obtained the consent of the Bishop to the publication of his biography in book form. This consent was given with great reluctance on the part of Bishop Jensen whose fears about "becoming modesty," "undue pretentions," and "adverse criticism" had to be overcome by persistent effort and persuasion. The author assumes all responsibility for whatever publicity this volume may acquire. If its subject matter should prove as interesting to the reader as it has been to the writer, the latter will have no apology to make for offering this book to the members of the Ward and the friends of its worthy Bishop.”

A Biographical Study of Leonard John Nuttall, Private Secretary to Presidents John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff

"This biographical study of Leonard John Nuttall emphasizes his contributions to the society in which he lived. He is best known for his association with the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Through his position as private secretary to the First Presidency and legal advisor to the Relief Society, a women's organization in the same Church, he worked closely with the Church leaders
for over twenty-five years. He also held important positions of leadership in territorial education and military affairs."

A Branch of Faith In the Forest

“This was an answer to their prayers. For more than five years they had lived in Pleasant Valley,
Washington-a sparsely populated wilderness area in the northwest corner of the state, far away from the nearest Latter-day Saint branch. They could have abandoned their religion, but they did not. It is a testimony to their complete conversion in Sweden that they remained faithful during those years.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

A Monument to the Handcart Pioneers

“What the Battle of the Marne was to the world war, the Handcart Expeditions were to western immigration. They proved a costly victory. No greater martyrs are found in history than the men who pulled the handcarts until their last day of life. These literally died in the harness. Brave allies were the women and children who trekked by their side. The survivors played their part in the "winning of the west;" the dead paid the "price of the prairie."

A Mormon Bride in the Great Migration

“Among the nearly 10,000 people who came to Utah in 1852, thereby carving for themselves a singular niche in the history of the American West was my great-great grandmother Olive Harriet Otto Terry. She had come to the Kanesville area in 1851; she left the area in 1852 as the bride of a Mormon emigrant. Her own story follows. substantially unedited.”

A Sentinel for the Saints: Thomas Leiper Kane and the Mormon Migration

“Thomas Leiper Kane was not a Mormon, and yet it is arguable that no other man, with the exception of Brigham Young, was more responsible for protecting and securing the Saints during the tumultuous years following their evacuation of Nauvoo, Illinois.”

A Sketch of My Life

Personal history of Edwin Scott continued by his daughter, Mrs. M. E. S. Beckstrand. The sketch covers emigration from England, voyage across the Atlantic, up the Mississippi, and crossing the plains to Utah. It continues with accounts of Indian wars, and other events experienced first-hand.

A Winter Rescue March Across the Rockies

An account of the rescue mission to resupply Johnston’s army as a result of raids by “Lot Smith, clever and elusive, captured several of the trains of supplies which were in the rear of the troops. Soon the prairies were lighted with the dazzling blaze from flaming bacon, and clouds of smoke rose in billows from burning clothing and army blankets. When the advance troops reached the site of famous Fort Bridger, for fourteen years past the rendezvous of mountain trappers and recruiting station for overland emigrants, only the charred shell of the wilderness post remained.”

Across the Plains in 1858

The original manuscript journal was obtained in January, 1930, froIn Frank L. Ackley, 107 No. Mole Street, Philadelphia, Pa., a son of the journalist. The son writes in part: "My father was a sutler at Camp Floyd and other places. He was employed at Salt Lake City in the store of Miller, Russell & Co., a branch of Russell, Majors & Waddell. The wagon masters of the above company all came to his store to be paid off'. There is much said in the journal of the desperadoes and tough characters of Salt Lake City in 1858-1859. Many characters are mentioned who were prominent in Utah or western history, such as General Harney, General A. S. Johnston, Col. Alexander, Porter Rockwell, Bill Hickman, Ephraim Hanks, Pegleg Smith, Mr. Russell, Captain Grant, James Bridger and Capt. Owen. "Interesting descriptions are given of the Mormon State Fair, the Mormon People, the customs in the store, one of the fir t public executions in Utah, the sutlers store at Camp Floyd. Guarding the U. S. Courts and Dobietown, (Fairfield)."

Adventures of a Young British Seaman, 1852-1862

The life story of a British convert, William Wood, who, rejected by friends and ridiculed by family, joined the navy for five years to earn enough to emigrate to Zion, served the Lord and became a well known and prosperous citizen in his community wherever he lived, and remained faithful through many trials.

Hartley, William G. "Adventures of a Young British Seaman, 1852-1862." New Era 10 (1980): 38-47.
Keywords: Wood, William/ Ocean travel/ Children and youth, 19th century

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

After Winter Quarters and Council Bluffs: The Mormons in Nebraska Territory, 1854-1867

“While enroute to the Great Basin in the summer of 1846, Brigham Young and the Mormons stopped in the Missouri River Valley to build temporary winter settlements. Not only
had the recruitment of the Mormon Battalion drained the movement of some of its sturdiest pioneers, but in addition the many difficulties encountered while crossing Iowa had convinced
Young that it was advisable to regroup and organize before continuing farther west. The main settlements, established in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and across the Missouri River at Winter Quarters, Indian country (later Nebraska Territory), although temporary, were well laid out and had an appearance of permanence. This alarmed the Indian agents west of the river, who reminded the Mormons that settlement on Indian lands was illegal and demanded that they abandon Winter Quarters following the second winter encampment.”

All are Safely Across

“Through diary entries and the reports of those who have studied the trail and water navigation, this paper will reveal how the Saints met the challenges of the waters and how their crossings aided others who followed in their wake.”

Allen Taylor and Early Mormon Emigration

The account about Allen Taylor who led one of five wagon trains to leave Pottawattamie in 1849. “The fifth captain, Allen Taylor, though probably the least known, was uniquely prepared to lead the company that, with 445 people, was nearly twice as large as any
other Mormon company to cross the plains that year.”

An Account of a Mormon Family’s Conversion to the Religion of the Latter-day Saints and of Their Trip from Denmark to Utah: Parts I and II

"This. account was written by Rev. H. N. Hansen, a great uncle of State Representative
William E. Darrington, of Persia, Iowa. Representative Darrington's great grandparents and grandmother, along with the great uncle, made up this immigrant family. The account was not written at this time but somewhat later, specific date unknown. The first two pages of the account are missing; the manuscript takes up about 1863 in Denmark when the family was being converted to the Mormon faith.
The original of this account is in the possession of one of Mr. Darrington's relatives who typed a copy for him. From this copy an Xerox was made and donated to the State Deparrtment of History and, Archives in April, 1970."

Hansen, H. N. "An Account of a Mormon Family's Conversion to the Religion of the Latter-Day Saints and of Their Trip From Denmark to Utah: Parts I and II." Annals of Iowa 41 (1971): 2-part series.
Keywords: Denmark/ Conversion experience/ Emigration and immigration/ Hansen, H. N./ Immigrants, Scandinavian

Permission: Licensed from Annals of Iowa, May 2010

An Impressive Letter from the Pen of Joseph Smith

“. . .Joseph Smith wrote an intimate letter to his wife, Emma. His impressive account of his struggles for repentance of his own forgiveness is touching; it is one of the most authentic glimpses of the Prophet’s repentance and effort for worthiness.”

Another Route to Zion: Rediscovering the Overland Trail

“But research now shows that this familiar trail was not the only one used by the Saints across Nebraska and Wyoming. Recent studies have noted that odd references to another trail keep showing up in emigrant journals.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

April 6, 1853: A Mid-Atlantic Celebration

“To Captain David Brown (of Massachusetts, and "tarnation 'cute, sir") there had never been such a company. He had crossed the sea many times but had never felt so happy with any people as he had with the Latter-day Saints. The Saints in turn had found the good skipper "a comfortable man," and in the diary of the voyage it was noted that "he felt he should be one of us before he reached New Orleans, as he was convinced that the work we were engaged in was from God."

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Are We There Yet? The Story of Children on the Mormon Trail

“The accounts of children provide information about trail life in general; they reveal the importance of the family unit in migration and settlement; they entertain and inspire; and they show how experiences on the trail affected children and prepared them for the later challenges and hardships associated with settling the frontier. Studying the trail through the eyes of children gives us a fuller understanding of Mormon migration and settlement.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Autobiography of Johannes Hasler

“Being the oldest child of our family, I worked at our little farm which was mostly planted with grapevines. It needed skillful work from early spring until fall to cultivate and care for them. In the winter months, besides attending school, I spent much time in learning music,
for which I had a great liking, especially band music. While I had to study a great deal without a teacher, I learned to play different instruments. In those days printed music was quite expensive. I borrowed copies from men that were efficient in the art and copied most of my pieces and arranged them for different instruments. I often spent whole nights in writing and arranging popular music, and when morning dawned I would steal up to my room and disarrange my bed to make mother believe I slept in it.”

Belated Emigrants of 1856

“There were other Latter-day Saints in Europe who were just as anxious to gather to Zion that season as those who had gone before, and this spirit had taken such a hold upon them that they left their various occupations before arrangements could be made for their transportation. The result was that many of them either had to go to the poorhouse that winter or run the risk of a late journey across the plains. They joyfully chose the latter course, and President Richards, seeing no better way out of the difficulty directed matters to that end.”

Bleeding Feet, Humble Hearts: Danish Mormon Migration, 1850-1860

An article about the handcart companies of the 1850s: “. . . So be it. It remains my belief that we are wrong, that we cannot cross the mountains with a mixed company of aged people, women and little children, so late in the season without much suffering, sickness and death; but seeing you are to go, I will go with you, will help you all I can, will work with you, rest with you, suffer with you, and if necessary, I will die with you." Levi Savage

Blessed, Honored Pioneers

on Sunday, 24 July 1977, 130 years after the first Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley, I gave
a talk in sacrament meeting about pioneers. It was a hard talk to prepare and give--not because I didn't feel deeply about the topic, but because I gave it in a language I had only recently learned to speak: Indonesian. I was a member of the Solo Branch in central Java, and the branch president had asked me to share something about the pioneers.

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Blossom: The Enoch Train and the Edmund Ellsworth Handcart Company of 1856

“As the final preparations were being concluded, Blossom's mother came to the Sheen Family with a request concerning her daughter. It is assumed she directed her petition to the
matriarch, Maria Loveridge Sheen, wife to James Sheen, Sr., mother and grandmother to the
dozen family members involved in the migration.
Her request: "Will you take my little girl with you?" One mother saying to another, in
essence, "I want you to have my child ... I am willing to trust her to your care because the
promise there is in what you are undertaking, even though it has as much of the unknown as
it does danger, her welfare with you would be better for her than to remain here with me."
Before you question this woman's judgment, you need to know that her daughter was
only three ... she was black ... and she was also blind.”

Bound for Zion: The Ten- and Thirteen-Pound Emigrating Companies, 1853-54

“Most immigrants to Utah, who came primarily from Great Britain and Scandinavia, had never ventured more than a few miles from their doorsteps and could not imagine the vast distances they would have to travel.3 What impelled these zealous believers to immigrate, not just to the eastern seaboard of America as so many others from Europe had done but to go another thousand miles inland from the then-frontier on the Missouri River?”
“The great impetus came from a belief integral to the LDS faith in the mid-nineteenth century: “gathering to Zion.” Believed literally and fervently, this tenet was nearly as fundamental as baptism. It reenacted the gathering of the Israelites to the Promised Land and was a necessary preparation for the coming of Christ in the “Last Days.” For the individual, it was the only way one might receive the full ordinances of the faith, for these had to be performed in a temple, the “House of the Lord.”

Boyhood Recollections Of President Joseph F. Smith

As told by himself at the meeting of the Genealogical Society of Utah, San Francisco, California, July 27 1915; also at a meeting in the Eleventh Ward Chapel, Salt Lake City, Utah, Decl., 26, 1915. Memories about Nauvoo, Hyrum Smith, and Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Kirtland, Missouri, crossing the plains and his mother Mary Fielding’s adventures coming to Zion.

Brannan Before the Brooklyn

“The most prominent - and problematic – of all the men and women who came to California in 1846 on the ship Brooklyn was Samuel Brannan, leader of the expedition. Brannan went on to become one of the richest men in the state, and after he left the LDS church in 1849, he became Mormonism's most famous apostate. His intimate connection with the LDS church proved to be a problem in his later life, and he found it convenient to put as much distance between himself and his past as possible. Brannan periodically rewrote his personal history to match his changing situation, leaving behind a tangled web of evidence that has thoroughly confused historians. Several fictionalized biographies written in the 1940s and 1950s compounded the problem, and it is now impossible to find a Brannan life history that is not shot through with error.”

Brigham Young and the Immigrants

“No one shaped the gathering as much as Brigham Young. In turn, his involvement with it for four-and-a-half decades was one of the major facets of his adult life. We can learn much about Brigham Young from his approach to immigration and the immigrants, and we can gain insights into the dynamics of Mormon society. Perhaps just as interesting is the feeling for the man and his times which can be
gained from his correspondence and epistles.”

Jensen, Richard L. "Brigham Young and the Immigrants." In Celebrating the LDS Past, comp. Ronald K Esplin, 101-13. Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History, BYU, 1992.
Keywords: Young, Brigham, leadership/ Perpetual Emigrating Fund/ Emigration and immigration/ Gathering/ Administrative history, emigration and immigration
Notes: Available BYU. (An earlier version of this paper was presented in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 21 January, 1983 as one of a lecture series, "The Legacy of Brigham Young," sponsored by the Utah State Historical Society, the City Creek Chapter of the Sons of the Utah Pioneers, and the National Society of the Sons of the Utah Pioneers.)

“The 1861 down-and-back Church trains signaled a revolution in how immigrants, Mormons or not, crossed the plains. The history of the overland trails from 1843 to 1868—the California Trail, Santa
Fe Trail, Oregon Trail, and Mormon Trail—has very few turning points in terms of how people traveled the routes.”

British Travelers View the Saints 1847-1877

“. . . this article looks at accounts by Britons who visited the Salt Lake Valley between the Latter-day Saints’ arrival in 1847 and the death of Brigham Young in 1877. . . seven books by travelers . . .before the . . .railroad in 1869 and eighteen by those who arrived by rail.”

Brooklyn Saints Leaving California 1848-1857

: “John Eagar of the Ship Brooklyn, with this company, is the first known Brooklyn passenger to leave California. Shortly after, a company of thirteen to sixteen, and still later a party of four men and one woman, also Brooklyn passengers, Franklin Weaver, his wife Rachel Reed Weaver, John Reed, and two others whose names are not known, caught up and traveled to Salt Lake Valley with the first two groups - Making sixty-five men and two women who participated in building the historic road over Carson Pass.”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

By Handcart to Utah: The Account of C. C. A. Christensen

One of those who pulled a handcart in 1857 was Carl Christian Anton Christensen (1831-1912), a Danish immigrant. Christen en's reminiscences of the trek, much like his well known paintings of Mormon history, incorporate charmingly detailed vignettes into the telling of the broader story. Thus
Christensen shares with the reader a feeling for the nature of the human experience of crossing plains and mountains with very limited resources. There are not more than a half dozen detailed accounts by participants of traveling by handcart, so Christensen's, published here in English translation for the
first time, is significant.

Celebrating Zion: Pioneers in Mormon Popular Historical Expression

“This dissertation examines how Mormons celebrate this pioneer experience as an identity-defining touchstone of their American-born religion. In the 1990s, Latter-day Saints still remember their precursors• flight from persecution in folklore; art; numerous museums and
monuments; as well as annual plays. pageants. and parades throughout the West. The most significant uniquely-Mormon holiday is Pioneer Day-the yearly July 24th celebration of Brigham Young's arrival in the Salt Lake Valley.”

Centennial Caravan: Story of the 1947 Centennial Reenactment of the Original Mormon Trek

“The 1947 trekkers endeavored to make their journey as much a replica of that of the original pioneers as pos3ible. Their personnel included 143 men. three women. and two boys--the same as that of the 1847 group. Both groups were organized in companies of hundreds, fifties and tens; both had a night guard, a chorus, a nightly encirclement of vehicles, and menus including meat from the deer, the antelope, and the buffalo. The 1847 caravan included 72 wagons, most of them bonneted with "white tops" and pulled by oxen or horses. The 1947 caravan consisted of 72 automobiles, all (except two "scout" cars) adorned with simulated covered wagons and plywood oxen.”

Children on the Mormon Trail

“Unfortunately, when discussing this period of Mormon migration to Utah, historians have traditionally neglected the accounts of the children on the Mormon trail. focusing almost exclusively on the seemingly more accurate records of adults. Recent studies, however, seem to suggest an increasing interest in this largely untapped area of historical inquiry. Be this as it may, recent studies that have dealt with the records of children have not dealt with the Mormon trail and focus mainly on children’s involvement in actual settlement and frontier life--paying scant attention to children’s records and experiences dealing with the overland trail.”

Children on the Mormon Trail

“This study deals specifically with Mormon children traveling west? For this particular group, families were even more important than they were for many other westering people, such as the Forty-niners, many of whom were single men. The family unit was and is a central part of Mormon life. Why then, if families were so essential to the westward movement, do we hear so little from the children who made up those families?”

Church Emigration

Series of pioneer voyage and travel accounts published in the Contributor between 1891 and 1893. This PDF combines 18 articles from the Church Emigration article series in one document.

Vol. XII. February, 1891. No. 4.
Reminiscences Of William C. Staines.

Vol. XII May, 1891 no. 7
I. The Principle Of Gathering
Chronological account of gathering the righteous out of the world to preserve the righteous from God’s curse upon the wicked. Enoch, Noah, Tower of Babel and Brother of Jared, Abraham, Moses, Zerubbabel and Ezra, Lehi, and the future gathering of scattered Israel prophesied in Isaiah.

Vol. XII June, 1891 no. 8
II. Places Of Gathering
Joseph and his family moved to Kirtland, Ohio, then Jackson County, Missouri, were expelled to Clay County, then on to Commerce, Illinois, later renamed Nauvoo, finally on to Utah, Salt Lake Valley. Emigrants poured into the gathering places from England and other European countries.

Vol. XII August, 1891 No.10
III. First Company Of Emigrants (Colesville Branch)
Joseph Smith teaches the principle of gathering inspiring the Colesville, New York Branch to move to Jackson County Missouri, following the Prophet in 1831. Joseph Knight, a prominent member of the community, one of Joseph Smith’s employers, supports the prophet and Oliver Cowdery’s translation work with supplies, a narration about his association with the Prophet and the move to Kirtland.

Vol. XII September, 1891 No. 11
IV. Early American Emigration
British Emigration To Nauvoo
Two articles enumerating the migrants who ended up in Nauvoo, those within the US migrating through Kirtland, Missouri, to Nauvoo, and those gathered in the British Isles.

Colonizing the Great Basin

“But the largest brigade commenced a systematic program of exploration, beginning with the Salt Lake Valley and then proceeding to Tooele Valley to the west, Weber and Ogden valleys to the north , Utah Valley to the south, and other nearby areas. The goal was to find suitable areas where the 16,000 Latter-day Saints poised on the banks of
the Missouri River could settle. Within a year or two a large exploring company was dispatched to southern Utah and across southern Nevada to southern California. They found iron in southern Utah, and oases and springs along their route, and laid the basis for many future Latter-day Saint settlements.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Coming to Zion: Saga of the Gathering

“More than 80,000 converts came from Europe between 1840 and 1900 in what
one historian called "the largest and most successful group immigration in United States history."1 In addition, other thousands in this century have come on their own from all over the world to make their homes among the Saint.
During the 19th century, "gathering" to Zion was the second step after conversion. The phrase comes from a revelation given shortly after the Church was organized in 1830 to New York members:
"Y e are called to bring to pass the gathering of mine elect; for min£ elect hear my voice ....”

Courage - the Unfailing Beacon

"We must not look back," wrote Joseph Young, the brother of President Brigham Young, "but placing our faith in God, we must leave our destiny in His hands."4 As one by one the Saints joined in the exodus, they likely reflected upon all they were leaving behind in Nauvoo as well as the uncertainties that lay ahead. Yet they drew upon their faith and courage and moved forward.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Crossroads in the West the Intersections of the Donner Party and the Mormons

“… this article will examine an area of this history less known yet no less significant to Latter-day Saint history. The reader will discover a few moments in time where the paths of the Donner Party and the Mormons crossed and mingled to become part of the fabric of both histories.”

Cutler’s Camp at the Big Grove on Silver Creek: A Mormon Settlement in Iowa, 1847-1853

“The Silver Creek camp remains unmarked today. What little is known about this site and its Mormon inhabitants exists mostly in a few surviving documents and in the memories of the inhabitants’ descendants as preserved by oral tradition.”

Developments Along the Overland Trail From the Missouri River to Fort Laramie, Before 1854

“The route on the north bank of the Platte River has been known primarily as the "Mormon Trail," but the disciples of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were certainly not alone in the use of this road. Before the years 1846-47 when the Mormons began their mass movement
westward through Nebraska this trail had seen use by trappers, traders and some emigrants.”

Richmond, Robert W. "Developments Along the Overland Trail From the Missouri River to Fort Laramie Before 1854." Nebraska History 33 (1952): 237-47.
Keywords: Mormon Trail

Permission: Licensed from Nebraska History

Diary of a Teenage Driver

“Nineteen-year-old Zeb Jacobs was out on the Mormon Trail because President Brigham Young
knew that teenagers like to drive. The prophet hired some older boys, including Zeb, to drive his wagons and carriages in Salt Lake City. But then, early in 1861, Brigham wanted to try a new way to transport immigrants across the plains. He decided to send out "down-and-back" wagon trains- "down" from Utah to Florence, Nebraska, to pick
up passengers and bring them "back" to Utah. Needing drivers for the Utah wagons he called Zeb and other "Utah Boys" on down-and-back missions for spring and summer.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Dickens and the Mormons

“To explain this reversal in his (Dicken’s) opinion and to realize how his final view differed from the typical attitude of his age, it is necessary to trace his opinions of the Mormons before 1863 and also to survey briefly the Mormon’s position in midcentury England.”

Die Auswanderung

The Mormon-sponsored emigrants from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria who came prior to World War I were generally transported in groups. Most often they traveled directly from Central Europe to Utah with the guidance of church emigration agents all the way to the Great Basin. German-speaking people of other religious persuasions came to Utah also, but generally they came individually and indirectly, often living several years in other parts of the United States prior to their move to Utah. Following World War I the group system of the Mormons ended. Thereafter, those who chose to come on their own initiative had to arrange their own finances and their own travel.

Discovering Mormon Trails: New York to California 1831-1868

“As a people the Latter -day Saints used at least a dozen well-known and not-so-well-known trails and roads from New York to California, from 1831 through 1868 and beyond, from the world-famous exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake to the totally forgotten Nebraska City Cutoff Trail once used by thousands. One of the aims of this study is to restore to memory some of these trails, to retell their history, and to provide maps to enable modern-day travelers to retrace them.”

Down and Back' Wagon Trains: Bringing the Saints to Utah in 1861

“Four of the wagon trains, created of donated wagons, originated not in the East but in the West. These went east or down from Utah to the Missouri River to bring back Mormon immigrants too poor to afford outfits. Four large 1861 Mormon wagon trains were of this type, called by contemporaries "down-and-back" trains or "church team trains."

Eastern Ends of the Trail West

From 20 July 1840, when the first Mormon converts arrived in New York City from England, to 1 May 1869,
when the first transcontinental railroad was completed, Mormons officially developed or used twenty-two points of departure, or staging grounds, from New York to California.

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Ellen Pucell Unthank

“President Faust enriched his Thursday evening address with several inspiring pioneer stories, including the story of Ellen ("Nellie") Pucell Unthank. Nellie was nine when she and her family sailed from Liverpool to America along with 852 other Saints aboard the ship Horizon. Traveling by train to Iowa City, the Pucells were assigned to the Martin Handcart Company. Unfortunate events caused this company of 576 Saints and 145 handcarts to begin their journey late in the summer of 1856. Their journey was again thwarted when they encountered heavy snowson the plains of Wyoming inOctober. Food and supplies ran short. Some sat to rest and never rose again. Nellie's parents died within five days of each other and were buried in shallow graves.”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

"Every Book . . . Has been Read Through" The Brooklyn Saints and the Harper’s Family Library

Pioneers, lead by Sam Brannan, instructed by Brigham Young, left for San Francisco Bay aboard the ship Brooklyn in February, 1846. They were given 179 volumes of the Harper’s Family Library. One passenger, at least, wrote, after three months, that he had read them all, an indication of the literacy of the passengers.

“This article details the plans, arguments and decisions of …(the) winter of 1846-47. At stake was far more than mere route plans; rather, basic questions of leadership and authority were being tested.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

From England to Salt Lake Valley in 1867

As far back as I can remember a vision of plowing the turbulent waters, walking hundreds of miles over mountain and plain, and finally reaching Zion was constantly before me. I was too young to think about trials and hardships, but I am quite sure that travel and romance were appealing to my nature. The conversations I often heard and the songs my father and others used to sing no doubt served to glint my dream of glory.

From Nauvoo to Miller's Hollow: The Mormon Trek Across Iowa

“Not all wagons had been outfitted, but Brigham Young, their leader, had given the signal to begin the first crossing of the Mississippi River into Iowa. These Mormons were not prepared for the trials and hardships that they were to encounter on the tall grass prairie. This 1846 Mormon exodus is one of the most fascinating chapters in Iowa history. These trailblazers hold the honor of marking the first great route across Iowa from the Mississippi to the Missouri
River.”

Gather Ye Together . . . Unto the Land of Zion

"The Perpetual Emigration Fund Company had a twofold purpose: 1. To supervise the migration of
approximately 15,000 "American" Saints from the Missouri River to the valley of the Great Salt Lake."
This task was completed in 1852.
"2. To organize and supervise the emigration of British, Scandinavian, and other European Saints. For this purpose a headquarters was established in Liverpool."

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

Gathering the Dispersed Nauvoo Saints, 1847-1852

“By the time spring 1847 arrived, the 14,000 members who had fled the Nauvoo area were located in numerous groups across the western United States. The main group was encamped along the Missouri River at Winter Quarters, Nebraska. (In addition, two groups of Saints were waiting to "gather to Zion" as soon as the Church identified its new home: more than 10,000 converts in the British Isles and some 238 Saints in northern California who had traveled from New England on the ship Brooklyn.)”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Genetic Structure of the Utah Mormons: Comparison of Results Based on RFLPs, Blood Groups, Migration Matrices, Isonomy, and Pedigrees

“The Utah Mormon population has been the subject of genetic structure studies based on migration matrices (Jorde 1982), isonymy (Jorde J. and Morgan 1987), pedigrees (Jorde 1989), and gene frequencies estimated from blood groups and protein electrophoresis (McLellan et al.1984). These studies have shown that the Utah Mormon population has a low inbreeding rate and is genetically quite homogeneous. Gene frequency analyses have demonstrated that the Utah Mormon population is genetically similar to the northern European populations from which it was derived, with little indication of genetic drift. A recent study revealed no evidence of a founder effect (O'Brien, Kerber et al. 1994). These results are all consistent with the demographic history of the population, which was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by over 100,000 individuals, most of whom were derived from northern Europe. High birthrates and a high rate of immigration contributed to rapid growth and a high degree of population mobility.
Given the extent of previous studies, the Utah Mormon population presents a useful opportunity for comparing DNA polymorphism results with those derived from other types of data. Here, we report an analysis• of nuclear RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism) and blood group variation in 442 Utah males from 8 geographic subdivisions. To our knowledge this is the first time that genetic kinship coefficients based.on RFLPs, blood groups, migration• matrices, isonymy, and pedigrees, have been estimated and compared in the same human population.”

Germanicus Passengers: From England to Early Settlement in Utah and Idaho

“On April 4. 1854. the Germanicus left Liverpool for New Orleans with a company of 220 Mormons on board, their ultimate destination the Great Salt Lake Valley. These men. women, and children represented only a small part of the 85,000 Mormon converts who crossed the Atlantic on their way to America between 1840 and 1890. Although several general accounts of this migration have been written, there are few studies of single ships and the experiences of individual emigrants in America. What follows is a reconstruction of the voyage of the Germanicus and the experiences of its passengers after their debarkation in New Orleans through their settlement in Utah and Idaho.”

Gleanings By The Way

The author states his purpose: “In the tour to the far West, made during the summer of 1837—and the sketch that depicts the outline of the Mormon Delusion, the author cherishes the hope that facts are brought to light that will interest a large class of readers.” The author devotes chapters 22-33 to his account of the rise of Mormonism. His bias is obvious. Prior chapters recount his extensive travels in many states.

Golden Pass Road, 1848-1850

In following the Hastings-Donner trail west from Fort Bridger in July, 1847, the Mormon Pioneers were grateful to find a beaten track already existing across the mountains to the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Reconnaissance made it clear the Donners had found the best if not the only route for crossing the Wasatch along the general line they adopted. Even so, the Pioneer trail was a difficult, not to say desperate proposition.

Handcarts on the Overland Trail

“It is Omaha, then, or more properly the Omaha region including Winter Quarters (later Florence) and Kanesville, which became the eastern end of the handcart route to Utah. Wheeled vehicles left this area as early as 1824 when William Ashley, a St. Louis fur man, unloaded his trade goods from a boat and started up the Platte with fifty pack horses and a team and wagon. His associate, William Sublette, hauled a wheeled cannon across the Continental Divide to a trading fort in 1827, and Captain Bonneville, an independent fur trader, took wagons
over South Pass in 1832.”

Handcarts to Utah, 1856-1860

“…only at one period, 1856-60, was the handcart employed for mass migration. The genesis of this unique travel plan is to be seen in the Mormon proselyting system and its marked success. Zion. As a gathering place for the faithful, was proclaimed early. and "gathering to Zion" became a cardinal principle of doctrine.”

Henry James Hudson and the Genoa Settlement

“The town of Genoa, Nebraska existed as a Mormon settlement in 1857-1859, some years before the present town was established. One of the founders and chief citizens of the settlement was Henry James Hudson. When the Mormon colony was disbanded in 1859, Mr. Hudson became a resident of Columbus.”

Historic Resource Study: Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail

“The study focuses on the history of the trail from its official beginning in Nauvoo, Illinois, to its terminus in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the period 1846-1869. During that time, thousands of Mormon emigrants used many trails and trail variants to reach Utah. This
study emphasizes the "Pioneer Route" or" Brigham Young Route" of 1846-1847.”

Historic Sites and Markers Along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails

“One of the things this book attempts to do is to further our growing appreciation and knowledge of those roads west across the country that were used from about 1830-when the trans-Appalachia region was still the Far West to many and when the first wagons were attempting the Oregon Trail-to the wedding of the rails at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in 1869.”

History of Patty Bartlett Sessions: Mother of Mormon Midwifery

“The History of Patty Bartlett ,Sessions, Mother of Mormon Midwifery has been compiled using her personal journals as the primary source. The journals begin with the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois in the dead of winter, February 10, 1846. Patty Sessions describes the entire journey of the Mormon pioneers across the great American desert bringing with them the church as restored by the Lord on April 6, 1830. Patty's daily accounts are accentuated with the perils of surviving in a harsh new land. The existing journals end with the peaceful settlement of the Great Salt V alley on 31 December 1866 where she is among her beloved friends and relatives. To a minor extent other sources have been quoted in compiling the most complete history of Patty Sessions' life as possible.”

History of Pottawattamie County, Iowa

“History of Pottawattamie County, Iowa from the earliest settlement to the present time embracing its topographical, geological, physical, and climatic features,… giving an account of its aboriginal inhabitants, early settlement by the whites, pioneer incidents, its growth, its improvements, organization of the county, the judicial history, the business and industries, churches, schools, biographical sketches, portraits of some of the early settlers, prominent men, …”

History Of Utah 1540-1886 – volume XXVI of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft.

“There is only one example in the annals of America of the organization of a commonwealth upon principles of pure theocracy. There is here one example only where the founding of a state grew out of the founding of a new religion. Other instances there have been of the occupation of wild tracts on this continent by people flying before persecution, or desirous of greater religious liberty …but it has been long since the world, the old continent or the new, has, witnessed anything like a new religion successfully established and set in prosperous running order upon the fullest and combined principles of theocracy, hierarchy, and patriarchy.” – from the preface

Home to Iowa: Letters From the Western Trails

“Home had not always been this cabin along Mosquito Creek; the Stagemans, like so many Americans on the move in the 19th century, were not yet rooted to one place. Christopher and Mary and their five children-Sarah, Harriet, John, James, and Mary Ann-arrived in America in 1840 from England, where Christopher had worked in livery and as a farrier on an estate near Carlisle. For eleven years the family farmed in the close-knit community of Fair Hill, Maryland.
In 1851, the Stageman family joined the westward movement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though only the eldest child, 23-year-old Sarah, had been baptized Mormon.”

"How Shall I Gather?"

“Estimates are that some 80,000 Latter-day Saints traveled to Utah while President Young presided over the Church, almost all of whom came in Church-organized wagon trains, sailing ships, riverboats, or trains. Behind this massive movement of people, one primary concern shaped and directed President Young--is absolute, bedrock-solid insistence that the Church must help the poor Saints gather to Zion.”

“One of the rare shooting episodes between the two groups (Mormons and Indians) took place in June 1848 at the Elkhorn River, a few days west of Winter Quarters. On the Mormon side, the prime participant was Howard Egan, a captain in the Heber C. Kimball wagon train, who, along with Thomas Ricks, was seriously wounded in the exchange of gunfire. At least two and possibly four Indians were killed. Because no full account exists of the shootout, one will be provided here.” The article continues with a long account of the trek to Salt Lake.

Image of Zion.• Mormonism as an American Influence in Scandinavia

“In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, long before Hollywood warped Europe's
image of the United States, we began to send abroad an influential ism, which was to gain thousands of zealous converts, but which sometimes proved so notorious that European governments on occasion thanked us to keep our peculiar invention at home. The country tried to disown it, but Mormonism, as native to America as Indian corn, was in fact a dynamic and very special version of
the country's romantic prospects, its optimistic gospel of a promised land.”

Immigration and the "Mormon Question": An International Episode

“It is ironic that Mormonism, so native to the United States that Tolstoi called it "the American religion," once seemed notoriously un-American. To the Christian Convention gathered in Salt Lake City in 1888 to review "the situation in Utah," it seemed, in fact, anti-American. Reverend A. S. Bailey, addressing all the denominational workers in the Territory, believed that a traveler visiting Utah would find not simply "more that is European than American," but "a spirit foreign to the spirit of Americans, ... a system indigenous indeed, but hostile to American ideas."

Mulder, William. "Immigration and the 'Mormon Question': An International Episode." Western Political Quarterly 9 (1956): 416-33.
Keywords: Emigration and immigration/ International politics

Permission: Licensed from Helen Mulder, December 2010

Immigration in the 1860s: The Story of the Church Trains

“… in the fall of 1860 the church announced a new method of travel for converts would commence the following spring. In lieu of handcarts, church trains comprised of ox-driven , wagons would be sent from Salt Lake City to the Missouri River to pick up waiting converts and then return to the valley in the same season.”

Hulmston, John K. "Mormon Immigration in the 1860s: The Story of the Church Trains." Utah Historical Quarterly 58 (1990): 32-48.
Keywords: Emigration and immigration/ Wagon trains/ Administrative history, emigration and immigration

Permission: Licensed from Utah State History, April 2010

Imperial Zion: The British Occupation of Utah

“They were not, of course, the first Britons to view America as Zion; an earlier group of "Saints" had viewed their settlement in New England as part of a divine plan to civilize the wilderness and set the light of true religion upon a hill. But these Mormon counterparts of Pilgrims and Puritans were no less avid in their belief that their journey was but a precursor to the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, aided and abetted by one of the most efficiently organized mass emigration schemes to ply the Atlantic routes.”

Inbreeding in the Utah Mormons: an evaluation of estimates based on pedigrees, isonymy, and migration matrices

“In summary, the pedigree results presented here largely corroborate previous results based on migration matrices. isonymy. and gene frequencies: the Utah Mormon population is
out bred, homogeneous, and has experienced little genetic drift since its founding. As a
consequence, one would expect the distribution and prevalence of genetic disease in this population to be quite similar to those of other U.S. populations.”

Jorde, Lynn B. "Inbreeding in the Utah Mormons: An Evaluation of Estimates Based on Pedigrees, Isonomy, and Migration Matrices." Annals of Human Genetics 53 (1989): 339-55.
Keywords: Sociological studies/ Genetics/ Family history

Incidents Of Travel And Adventure In The Far West

“The incidents are most of them transcripts from original letters, written in the familiar style of friendly correspondence. The description of a journey from Great Salt Lake City to San Bernandino, is an exact copy from my journal, written after many days of wearisome travel. The Mormon Episodes, I have rendered almost verbatim from personal relations by the parties themselves, and not from " hearsay." While the Latter-day Saints publicly adopt every opportunity to openly avow and zealously propagate the System of Polygamy in direct opposition to the established and acknowledged code of morality as practised by all civilized nations I but exercise my prerogative in exposing some of its abuses, which consider destructive to morality, female delicacy, and the sanctity of marriage…. I have appended to -the end of this volume, several discourses and addresses, some, of which were delivered duringmy sojourn in Utah, by President Brigham Young and his apostles, and reported by G. D. Watt, Esq. of Great Salt Lake City”

Carvalho, Solomon Nunes. Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856.
Keywords: Travelers' accounts, 19th century/ Fremont, John C.
Notes: (Title continues: With Col. Fremont's last expedition across the Rocky Mountains: including three months residence in Utah, and a perilous trip across the great American desert to the Pacific. Last section titled "Mormonism.") Also printed in London, 1856. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1973.

Permission: Public domain

"Introduction." In The Mormon Trek West: The Journey of American Exiles

“The belief that this famous trail was a Mormon creation or discovery is mistaken. It may be that of the thousands of miles of trails and roads the Mormons used during their migrations from 1831 through 1868, from New York to California, they actually blazed less than one mile. This one bit of authenticated trail-blazing lies between Donner Hill and the mouth of Emigration Canyon, just east of Salt Lake City. The Mormons were not looking for a place in the history books. They had a job to do and they did it as easily and as expeditiously as possible, always using the best roads available. But whether the trail should rightfully be called the
Mormon Trail or the Great Platte River Road, the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, or something else, Wallace Stegner said, I believe accurately, "By the improvements they made in it, they earned the right to put their name on the trail they used .... "

Iowa in 1846: Context for the Trail

“By the time Iowa was admitted to the Union, the first exodus of Saints had long since departed from Nauvoo and had encamped at Winter Quarters, Nebraska, as well as at Kanesville, Iowa, and in many similar camps on the Iowa side of the Missouri River. Perhaps it was the preoccupation of the Iowans with their efforts to become a state that enabled the Saints to cross
Iowa with less persecution than they had encountered in previous places. Certainly, Territorial Governor James Clarke behaved better under the circumstances than the governors of Missouri and Illinois.”

John Watkins

“English convert John Watkins exemplifies the thousands of early Saints who grasped the gospel abroad and sacrificed greatly to gather in Zion. Born on April13, 1834, John was the third son of Thomas and Sarah Jordon Watkins.”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

Joseph Smith Contemplated a Western Migration

“Two years before the martyrdom the Prophet gave expression to the well-known prophecy about his followers becoming a "mighty people in the midst of the Rocky Mountains." An entry in the official history of the church under date of August 6, 1842, bears this information . . .”

Holmes, Gail George, comp. "Kanesville, Iowa, Revealed in Pages of the Frontier Guardian." Nauvoo Journal 6, 2d ed. (1994): 8-15.
Keywords: Mormon Trail/ Exodus/ Council Bluffs, Iowa/ Publications (Mormon), Frontier GuardianNotes: (Note: The "second edition" of vol. 6 of the Nauvoo Journal reprinted material printed in the original publication, but in more accessible form. It was actually published in 1996, but the cover carried the original date.)

Permission: Licensed from Mormon Historic Sites Foundation

Kerstina Nilsdotter: A Story of the Swedish Saints

“Although there are stories of the first converts, immigrants, and early missionaries that are extraordinary and mostly well documented, they are the exceptions. Karsti's experiences, in contrast,
represent a much larger group: ordinary Swedish Mormon converts who left the familiarity of home and country to come to a new world, vastly different from what they knew. In learning about her, it soon becomes obvious that even the story of an "average" Swedish immigrant convert is nothing less than remarkable.”

Latter-day Saints at Iowaville, Iowa: 1846-1851

“Iowaville once sat a bit north of the original Mormon Trail taken by Brigham Young's early caravan of Saints. It was a small village twenty miles upriver from where the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail (as we now call it) crossed the Des Moines River.”

Letter Describing a March to Utah in 1859

Hiram W. Studley’s letter recounting his march to Utah with Johnston’s Army and the sites and experiences along the way. “Agreeable to promise I will now endeavor to give you an account of our journey, hoping that it may interest sufficiently for its perusal, and while away perhaps an otherwise unhappy hour. We shall narrate things as they occurred to us on the journey and as they come to our minds.”

Letters of a Proselyte: The Hascall-Pomeroy Correspondence

: Here in the letters of Irene Hascall Pomeroy and her mother Ursulia B. Hascall, is recorded in miniature a large sweep of American history. The letters are full of the dreams, faith, and hopes of the writers; yet, they are universal in that they express the dreams and yearnings or countless others. Though universal in appeal, the letters are intensely personal and reveal that their newly-found faith, Mormonism, formed the warp and woof of the lives of Irene and Ursulia.

Letting the World Know

“On 22 July 1997, the Mormon Trail wagon train reenactment reached its culmination with an emotional flourish as an estimated 50,000 people greeted the 61 wagons, 9 handcarts, 45 horseback riders, and 380 walkers at This Is the Place State Park near the mouth of Emigration Canyon in Salt Lake City, Utah.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Life On Board a Mormon Emigrant Ship

“All in all, the history of the Mormon migration is a story of success. With time, the life on board emigrant ships was made more secure, and the experience was used to fellowship converts into a new way of life and discipline them for survival in the Great Salt Lake Valley.”

London to Salt Lake City in 1867: The Diary of William Driver

“The following pages contain the account of a Mormon's trip across sea and plain to the new Zion, in the Pioneer era of Utah, or before the building of the transcontinental railroad. It is written in simple language, and with little knowledge of those rules of composition that plague contemporary
students, but it gives an intimate insight into the experiences of thousands of European immigrants who made possible the building of the America that we know today.”

Markers for the Remembrance: The Mormon Trail

“It was wooden, the carving weathered and a little forlorn. It looked as though it had been hiding in a fence corner for a dozen hard Iowa winters. The legend read, "Mormon Trail".
In the years of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Iowa, 1933-1940, a whole platoon of these signs had marched across the old Trace in southern counties. Roy Chastain of Des Moines, then employee of the Iowa Conservation Commission, has good reason to remember both the Trail and the markers.”

Mary Fielding Smith: Her Ox Goes Marching On

“I should preface these remarks by establishing two things. First, I am no blood relation to Mary Fielding Smith, although, like all of you, I proudly claim her for a spiritual sister; second, my subject is not Mary Fielding Smith herself but what she represents: the process by which women of church history are turned into heroic role models for women of contemporary times.”

Members of the Ellsworth and McArthur Handcart Companies of 1856

“It has been my purpose in preparing this compilation of vital statistical information to show my appreciation for the Ellsworth and McArthur Handcart Companies. Unfortunately, some of the statistical information recorded by the members and their posterity was inaccurate, conflicting, or incomplete.”

Members of the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies of 1856: A Sesquicentennial Remembrance

CONTENTS
Members of the Willie Handcart Company .......................... l
Members of the Martin Handcart Company ......................... 42
Members of the Willie and Martin Handcart
Companies whose names appeared only in journals ............... 100
Members of the Willie and Martin Handcart
Companies who died crossing the plains ........................ 102
Bibliography .................................................. 107

Migration To And From A Northern Wyoming Mormon Community 1900 to 1925

“This paper, focusing on Cowley, Wyoming, which lost more than one-third of its original settlers within twenty-five years of its establishment in 1900, is a reminder that some Mormon colonization ventures did not live up to their founders' expectations, and it suggests
that pioneers' ages, areal backgrounds, and occupations were instrumental in determining the degree and direction of settler mobility in and out of the Cowley community.”

Migration, Social Change, and Mormonism in Portugal

“The history of the LDS Church in Portugal during the 1970s and early 1980s is a dramatic example of religious growth in disruptive and difficult circumstances. It also serves as a case study that can provide clues for the growth of the Church throughout the world.”

Grover, Mark L. "Migration, Social Change, and Mormonism in Portugal." Journal of Mormon History 21 (1995): 65-79.
Keywords: Portugal/ Missiology, western Europe/ Africans, Portugal/ Social and cultural history, 20th century

Permission: Licensed from Mormon History Association, June 2010

Minnesota Mormons: A History of the Minneapolis Minnesota Stake

"This book is an attempt, then, not only to satisfy my own curiosity about the history of the stake, but to make it
available to others. From the earliest days when lumber missionaries labored to supply boards and shingles to the Nauvoo Temple, through the tentative, early organization of congregations who shivered through winters in rented buildings,and rejoiced over each step forward (even if only buying silverware for the meetinghouse kitchen), to the organization of a fully functioning stake,"

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

Missionary Experience

An account of the appearance of Samuel W. Richards, before a select committee of the House of Commons, to answer questions about emigration procedures of the Church because of the low mortality and efficient organization of the process, in order to draft new laws because of high mortality among emigrant ships represented by non-Mormon agents.

Missionary Experience Recalled by the Death of Queen Victoria

"Mr. Richards, it is not in the power of any civil government to create and maintain such an organization as you have. We cannot attempt any such policy, but if you can tell us anything that we can do to better the condition of our emigrants who go to sea, we want you to do it.”

Richards, Samuel W. "Missionary Experience Recalled by the Death of Queen Victoria." Improvement Era 4 (1901): 363-67.
Keywords: Richards, Samuel W./ British Isles, 19th century/ Missiology, British Isles, 19th century/ Emigration and immigration
Notes: This is different from article appearing in the CONTRIBUTOR.

Permission: Public domain

Mormon and Nonmormon Migration In and Out Of Utah

“Migration is the most problematic of the processes which could change Utah's
Mormon-non-Mormon population balance (Kan and Kim, 1981). Rates of natural increase and religious conversions are already known to favor Mormons (Kephart,1982). Of the demographic processes, migration is generally viewed as having the most potential for swiftly changing population composition, and it is also recognized as an important agent of cultural change and diffusion (Goldstein, 1976).”

Mormon Economic Organization

“While people on the Western frontier generally followed the individualistic pattern, this was not true of the Latter-day Saints. Observers of pioneer Mormon society, whatever their opinions on other aspects of Mormon life, were unanimous in giving praise to the effectiveness of Mormon organization. With remarkable unity and solidarity the processes of economic life in Mormon Country were planned and executed as group maneuvers. After a complicated decision-
making process in which there was interaction between leaders and followers, administrative directives were prepared giving detailed instructions for the Mormon community to follow.”

Mormon Emigration Trails

“. . . this essay focuses on the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail, the 1846-47 route between Nauvoo, Illinois, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Because hundreds of miles of the Oregon, California, and Pony Express
trails are nearly identical to the Mormon Trail, because many Mormons used the Oregon Trail, and because the Mormon Battalion walked the entire Santa Fe Trail, selected studies of those trails are also listed in the general sections of this essay.”

This finding aid has been prepared to assist users who are seeking information about the experiences of a particular emigrant. The. guide is arranged by year and, therein,by
pioneer company (appearing in order of company number and the somewhat random order of the "Church Emigration Books" and lists in various editions of the Church Almanac).

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

Mormon Settlements in the Missouri Valley

History of the trials of the Saints expelled from Nauvoo, their flight to Indian lands in Missouri, the negotiations with the Indians, and the difficulties of both during the exodus and trek to the West.

Mormon Sources for Immigration History

Mormon shipping lists, manuscript mission histories, a manuscript history of "Church Emigration" providing a description of each organized emigrant company to 1869, the records of mission congregations, and a growing collection of personal literature -- immigrant letters, journals, and memoirs -- may all be found in the Library-Archives Division of the Historical Department (formerly known as the Historian's Office) of the church, their use facilitated by both traditional
card files and, increasingly, computerized indexes, guides, and registers, more fully described below.

Mormon Trail From Vermont to Utah: A Guide to Historic Places of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

“This booklet was prepared with the express purpose of presenting to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a guide to the historic places of the Church, from Vermont to Utah. The writer recognized the need for such a guide during the summer of 1951 while conducting the first annual Brigham Young University L. D. S. Church History tour.”

Mormon Trail, Voyage of Discovery: The Story Behind the Scenery

“Zion! The thought of a permanent Zion was uppermost in the minds of the Mormons as they left Nauvoo, Illinois, in February 1846, for what they hoped would be a safe haven in the Rocky Mountains. The first wagons were ferried across the Mississippi River, or crossed in skiffs, but then the river froze and many were able to travel over on the ice. Despite the bitter cold, there was a sense of joy in this "Camp of Israel" to be able to suffer "for the truth's sake."

Mormon Trails in Iowa

“The trek of the Mormons from Nauvoo on the Mississippi to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, at that time a part of Mexico, is one of the most colorful episodes in the history of the American frontier. Measured in terms of distance traveled and the number of individuals involved, it eclipses the heyday of mule-skinning on the fabulous Santa Fe Trail. For sheer drama it rivals the steady flow of empire.-builders plodding westward along the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Northwest. Only the trail of the indomitable Forty-niners can be said to surpass it in point of daring, hardships suffered, and mass movement of pioneers.”

Mormons And Argonauts – from History of Wyoming chapter IX pgs 124-133

“Origin And History Of The Mormon Church—Early Mormon Colonies Opposition—The Mormon Battalion—Winter Quarters The Emigration— The Scare Of 1857-58—Johnson's Expedition—Westward Ho---The Argonauts Discovery Of Gold In California---The Excitement—The Overland Route Success And Failure---Sutter And Marshall.”
“The story of the Mormon emigration westward is intimately interwoven with the history of the State of Wyoming. That event is more closely related to the settlement of the country than was the emigration to Oregon or California for the reason that quite a number of the Mormons stopped at various places on the way westward and became permanent settlers. In connection with the story of this emigration, although not an essential part of Wyoming's history, it may be of interest to the reader to know something in general of this peculiar sect.”

Mormons and Early Iowa History (1838-1858): Eight Distinct Connections

"Mormon connections to Iowa are noted in early Iowa histories, linger in local and family lore, and show up on Iowa's landscapes and maps.1 Evidence of and stories about Mormon wagon ruts, swales, graves, wells, camping sites, cabins, enterprises, and place names are found in the broad swath of southern Iowa counties through which the Mormon Trail and its alternates passed, and along the I-80 corridor from Iowa City to Council Bluffs. Unfortunately, observers often confuse or conflate the various connections between Mormons and early Iowa history."

Mormons and Gentiles on the Atlantic

The emigration of Mormons from Europe. to Nauvoo and Salt Lake City made up only a small fraction of the movement of people from the Old World to the United States in the nineteenth century. But just as the Mormons were convinced that their migration was divinely inspired. so they never ceased to claim that the details of its organization possessed unique merit.”

Mormons From Scandinavia, 1850-1905: The Story of a Religious Migration

During the second half of the nineteenth century thirty thousand Mormon converts left Scandinavia to follow the gleam to Zion, a movement •as large as the "Puritan migration of the 1630's, though over a longer• period. • England, earliest of Mormonism’s .foreign fields, had already been yielding a rich harvest of convert-emigrants for thirteen years when in 1850 operations were extended to Scandinavia."

Mormons on the High Seas: Ocean Voyage Narratives to America 1840-1890; Guide to Sources in the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Other Utah Repositories

“Narratives of ocean travel and shipboard life of Mormon emigrants and missionaries found in published and unpublished letters, reports, and journals were included. These were further limited to primary accounts of voyages across the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean to America. Accounts of voyages in large organized companies, small groups, or single Mormon individuals were included. Accounts of the ocean travels of Mormons
departing from American ports to other countries were not included in this guide. River travel narratives were also not included. A cutoff date of 1890 was established for this finding aid because the Church changed its gathering policy about that time.”

Bashore, Melvin L., and Linda H. Haslam. Mormons on the High Seas: Ocean Voyage Narratives to America (1840-1890): Guide to Sources in the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Other Utah Repositories. Salt Lake City: Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1990.
Keywords: Sources/ Ocean travel, sources

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

Mormons, Nebraska and the Way West

“The founder and the early leaders were primarily products of the rocky hills of New England. In many cases their ancestors had been among the first settlers in that part of the new world. Today it may not be politic nor in good taste to say so, but the background of this religious society is strictly white, protestant, and Anglo-Saxon, with a later and considerable infusion of Scandinavian and Germanic elements. Proselyting efforts of the church, for some
reason or other, have had little results among the Latin or eastern nations of Europe.”

Mt. Pisgah Mormon Cemetery

As A result of the tenth Historic Pilgrimage conducted by Vida Fox Clawson to
Winter Quarters and other points of Church interest has come the “discovery" that the Mount Pisgah Mormon Cemetery in Union County, Iowa, is the property of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-a fact which apparently was heretofore not a matter of record either in the Church Historian's Office or in the Presiding Bishop's Office, because its acquisition in 1886 had apparently been forgotten. Being a cemetery, no tax notice has ever been issued to the Church for this property.

“These finding aids made it possible for our library to easily and quickly help people find out details about the voyage of an ancestor sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to America or crossing the plains in a pioneer company. It became a valuable tool for people writing family histories and for historians and writers.”

“Knowing that hands-on experience can enhance histories, and being engaged in research about nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint immigration, I grabbed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Sea Trek 2001 provided me to cross the Atlantic on a tall sailing ship-a hands-on workshop to experience something of what those immigrants experienced. My fifty-nine days with Sea Trek gave me several insights that can help us tell the immigration story better.”

No Small Miracle

“What is it like to move this army of animals across half a continent? What do you feed them? How do you drive them? And what about wild animals along the way? A look at the subject reveals not a small miracle, but an undertaking of staggering proportions.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

No Small Miracle: The Movement of Domestic Animals Across the Plains

“What was it like to move this army of animals across half a continent? Where did they come from? How did the Saints train, feed, carry, or drive them? When a draft animal sickened or died, how was it replaced? What laws were instituted to control the animal population of a
company? This article discusses these questions --focusing mostly on cattle, horses, and oxen-using journals, letters, declarations by Church leaders, and contemporary newspaper accounts.”

No Toil nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton

“This work, then, is more than a biography. In its expanded interpretive framework I hope it will catch the interest of Mormons as well as those of other faiths who seek greater insight into the nature of the Latter-day Saint community during the hectic years of the nineteenth century. Those who are familiar with Church history remember Clayton as a personal friend and scribe of Joseph Smith, the man who recorded the revelation on plural marriage, a journalist who left us one of the most intimate accounts of the epic crossing of the plains in 1847, author of that best known of all Mormon hymns, "Come, Come, Ye Saints," and compiler of the noteworthy Latter-day Saints' Emigrant Guide. But this volume is equally, if not more, concerned with Clayton the representative disciple. . .”

Dixon, W. "'On the Banks of a Beautiful Stream': The End of the Mormon Trail." Pioneer (1997): 10-13.
Keywords: Mormon Trail

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

On the Trail in January

“On 11 January, President Young met with several leading elders and told them of a dream he had wherein the Prophet Joseph Smith visited with him and "conversed freely about the best manner of organizing companies for emigration." Three days later, on 14 January, President Young met at Heber C. Kimball's home with Elders Kimball, Willard Richards, Orson Pratt, Wilford Woodruff, George A. Smith, Ezra T. Benson, and Hosea Stout, who acted as clerk. He then "commenced to give the Word and Will of God concerning the emigration of the Saints and those who journey with them"
(Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 1846- 1847, ed. Elden J. Watson [1971]. 502)”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Our Travels Beyond the Mississippi

Series of accounts of pioneer travel to Utah published in the Woman’s Exponent volumes 12 and 13 between 1883 and 1884 by Helen Mar Whitney. The Woman’s Exponent can searched on the BYU Harold B. Lee Library website. http://lib.byu.edu/ Search in the “Library Catalog” using the “advanced keyword search”, in the “periodical title” field using the term “Woman’s Exponent”.

Over the Pioneer Trail

“On suggestion of Hon. B. H. Roberts, it was arranged by the General Board some weeks ago to provide for a company of M. I. A. Scouts to pass over .the old pioneer trail from Echo to Salt Lake City, the trip to be made in July, so that the boys might enter the Valley on July 24, Pioneer Day. The purpose of the trip, besides the outing, is to inspire the boys with the nobility of the work of the pioneers, educate them in early Utah history, and encourage the building of an auto road over the old route.”

Parley P. Pratt in winter Quarters and the Trail West

“Arriving in Winter Quarters just when Brigham Young and the pioneers were leaving for the West, Parley, and to a lesser extent John Taylor, reorganized and enlarged the companies for emigration west, negotiated with the Omaha and Otoe Indians and the U.S. government Indian agents to protect the Mormons’ cattle from Indian attack, and tried to make Winter Quarters more economically efficient.”

Peter and Sara Farr LeCheminant and the 1854 Mormon Emigration From Europe to the Great Salt Lake Valley

“On the 19th of August, 1851, Peter and Sarah and their older children were baptized members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and thus began a remarkable family adventure. The family responded to the compelling call of the Church leaders in America for the faithful to hasten to Utah, to gather to the valleys of the mountains. However, Peter died of tuberculosis on Guernsey in February, 1853. Despite this tragedy, Sarah was determined to emigrate. She was 38 years old when she obtained financial help from the Church's newly established Perpetual Emigrating Fund, and with her five children between the ages of four and thirteen years, joined the 1854 Mormon emigration to Utah.”

Photographing Across the Plains: Charles R. Savage in 1866

“While the invention of photography came along just in time to record most of Nebraska's history, there are some elements of that history conspicuously absent from the photographic record. One of the most notable is photographs of emigrants traveling the overland
trails during the Great Migration, 1841-66.”

“I shall argue that, if we reject the style of Apollo and follow the style of the Mayflower and the Mormons, we shall find the costs of space-colonization coming down to a reasonable level. By a reasonable level of costs I mean a sum of money comparable to the
sums which the Pilgrims and the Mormons successfully raised. To give this argument substance, I must begin by establishing the true costs of the Mayflower and Mormon expeditions and the proper rates of exchange for converting these costs into 1977 dollars.”

"Pleasing to the Eyes of an Exile": The Latter-day Saint Sojourn at Winter Quarters, 1846-1848

“As if overnight, a city appeared on the western banks of the Missouri River to shelter nearly four thousand Latter-day Saint exiles….By all appearances, Winter Quarters heralded abundant promise as a new outpost on the American frontier.”

Pushing on to Zion: Kanesville, Iowa, 1846-1853

“Joining the recruiters on 11 July was Thomas L. Kane, a Philadelphia lawyer from a prominent family and a future lifelong friend and advocate for the Latter-day Saints. He described the encampment that
spread out before his eyes: . . Kane could not know then that he was witnessing the start of a seven-year occupation of that location, and that shortly these Saints would build a town there and name it Kanesville in his honor.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Rail Routes (1831-1869)

“The effective beginning of railroad travel in the United States came in May 1830 with the opening of the first division of the Baltimore and Ohio line, an event that would greatly affect Mormon immigration. The story of Mormon immigrants and the railroads is little known. Generally, little attention has been paid to pioneer immigrants except as travelers in wagons. Yet very few Mormons went west solely by wagon.”

Recollections – Joseph F. Smith

A series of seven articles published in the Juvenile Instructor in 1861. All seven are compiled into one PDF. These recollections recount Joseph F. Smiths memories from his youth in Nauvoo to crossing the plains and arrival in Salt Lake.

Refugees Meet: The Mormons and Indians in Iowa

Summary of the encounter between the Sac and Fox Indians and the Mormons of Nauvoo both groups being displaced by hostile neighbors and taking refuge in Illinois and Iowa, the Mormons in Nauvoo and the Indians in Iowa on the opposite shore of the Mississippi.

Remembering the Julia Ann

“When the three-masted Julia Ann blew into a hidden coral reef during an 1855 storm, the ship was carrying 21 Australian converts on their way to the Salt Lake Valley. Five Latter-day Saints were killed, and
the survivors lived for two months on coconuts, crabs, and sea turtles while crew members repaired the
ship's boat. A traveling exhibit titled "The Wreck of the Julia Ann" was on display through 21 February
1999 at the Museum of Church History and Art . . .”

“Some 1,650 pioneers wintered in the Salt Lake Valley during 1847-1848. In August, Brigham Young and a number of his pioneering colleagues began a return trip to Winter Quarters in order to help organize the next year's migration. These eastward-bound pioneers left in two groups. The first party left on August 16-17…”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

Rites Of Passage: The Gathering As Cultural Credo

Rites Of Passage:The Gathering As Cultural Credo Abstract: Many have studied perceptively the philosophy, logic, demography and mechanics of the gathering. I here have tried to understand
the meaning of one segment of that process—the crossing of oceans. I am interested in what that process meant to the participants themselves, the thoughts and reflections of those colliers, farmers, domestics, coopers, and tailors, as they undertook what for each of them was an epic, truly life-altering journey.

Roads Across Buckskin Mountain

“Near the end of its first decade in the Great Basin, the lV1onnon hierarchy found itself in difficulties. Deseret was occupied by Federal troops and there was considerable doubt that the Saints could continue to thrive with these outsiders in their midst. Church leaders judged that it would be wise to establish an escape route into New Mexico Territory (which then included Arizona) and possibly into Mexico itself.”

Robert Lang Campbell: A Wise Scribe in Israel and Schoolman to the Saints

“Although he was not the recipient of the divine will directly, as a faithful disciple, a ‘wise scribe in Israel,’ and as schoolman to the Saints, Robert Campbell can be viewed as one of the many unsung ‘civil Servants’ of the kingdom who recorded and transmitted the revelations to the world and to the Saints.”

Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley

“One hundred years ago a book was being prepared for publication in England under the title Route From Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley. The work, which came from the press in 1855, was illustrated with thirty-six steel engravings and nine wood cuts prepared from sketches made by Fredrick Piercy”

Route From Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley: Illustrated with Steel Engravings and Wood Cuts From Sketches Made by Frederick Piercy

“The following Work was originated in 1853, by a desire on the part of many of the Latter-day Saints to possess a collection of engravings of the most notable places on the Route between Liverpool and Great Salt Lake City.”

Piercy, Frederick H. Route From Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley. Edited by James Linforth. Liverpool: Franklin D. Richards; London: Latter-Day Saints' Book Depot, 1855.
Keywords: General overviews, 19th century (books)/ Emigration and immigration/ Mormon Trail, visual arts/ Perpetual Emigrating Fund/ Piercy, Frederick H./ Emigration and immigration, visual arts/ Gathering/ Visual arts, engravings and woodcuts
Notes: (Title continues: Illustrated with Steel Engravings and Wood Cuts from Sketches Made by Frederick Piercy, Including Views of Nauvoo and the Ruins of the Temple, with a Historical Account of the City; Views of Carthage Jail; and Portraits and Memoirs of Joseph and Hyrum Smith; Their Mother, Lucy Smith; Joseph and David Smith, Sons of the Prophet Joseph; President Brigham Young; Heber C. Kimball; Willard Richards; Jedediah M. Grant; John Taylor; the Late Chief Patriarch, Father John Smith; and the Present Chief Patriarch, John Smith, Son of Hyrum. Together with a Geographical and Historical Description of Utah, and a Map of the Overland Routes to that Territory, from the Missouri River. Also, an Authentic History of the Latter-day Saints' Emigration from Europe from the Commencement up to the Close of 1855, with Statistics.) Reprint, Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1959; reprint, ed. Fawn M. Brodie, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1962.

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Sail and Rail Pioneers before 1869

LDS immigrants trekking west by boat and train endured harassment, filthy accommodations, hunger and accidents before even starting their wagon journeys.” “Those important legs of their journeys were sometimes well over a thousand miles long—a real story, a real journey, which was in many cases as hazardous and arduous as the final trek across the plains.”

Saints From the Good Ship Brooklyn

A short article summarizing the conditions that the Saints encountered doubling the size of Yerba Buena upon their arrival in California, where they found no food, housing, or employment, and how they employed their industry to adjust to their surroundings.

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

Sam Brannan and the Mormons in Early California

“Our people witnessed the first American flag over Y erba Buena. Our Battalion boys built the
first flagpole in Pueblo de Los Angeles and draped it with the Stars and Stripes.' Earliest Anglo-Saxon
colonizers under the new flag were Mormons. Mormon picks laid bare the gold which plunged a world into
the delirious frenzy of 1849. It was Mormons who changed the ranchos' idle acres to the richest agricultural
section in the world.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Sarah Loader Holman: Handcart Pioneer

“She was ninety-nine years of age when she passed away in March 1942, one of the last, and possibly the last survivor of one of the great pioneer treks of history. Some time before her death, she told me her story.”

Scandinavian Saga

“In the telephone directories, Utah looks decidedly Anglo-Scandinavian. History and the statistics confirm the impression. Utah's Scandinavians and their descendants, as with most of the state's other immigrants from northern Europe, are largely the fruit of over a century of Mormon proselyting abroad. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when Mormonism preached its doctrine of the "gathering" with vigor and conducted a program of organized migration to Zion, some thirty thousand converts from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden felt persuaded that the valleys of Deseret were Kingdom Come and set out for a frontier far beyond
the broader acres their countrymen were homesteading in Minnesota and Wisconsin and well ahead of the Scandinavian invasion of Nebraska and the Dakotas. Backsliders among the Mormon Scandinavians helped people the great West between the Mississippi and the Rockies. . .”

Sesquicentennial Reflections: A Comparative View of Mormon and Gentile Women on The Westward Trail

“The similarities and differences between early Mormon and Gentile trail women will be explored here, including how Mormon women on the trail coped with their additional burdens. The essay maintains that these two groups of women experienced the westward migration in strikingly dissimilar ways.”

Ship Brooklyn, published in the Historical Record by Andrew Jenson

Sol Barth: A Jewish Settler on the Arizona Frontier

“. . .the fortunes of Sol Barth were intirnately involved with the settlement of the Southwest. These same fortunes were also associated, somewhat ironically, with the physical expansion of the Mormon Church from its core in Utah into Arizona Territory. Sol's mercantile goals usually placed him in opposition to the theocratic expansion of the Mormons, but there
were moments of near empathy between the Jew and the Latter Day Saint. These relationships add a special flavor to the history of St. Johns, Arizona, and its region.”

Some Uncommon Aspects of the Mormon Migration

“The period from 1835 to 1869, when the railroads were joined at Promontory Summit, was a time in
Western America when thousands of people moved to the Far West on horseback or with wagons. The Mormons were not the first of the western pioneers; they did not compose the vast majority of those who went west; and they did not pioneer the first trans-Missouri wagon road. But there are some aspects of what they did that tend to be ignored in historical accounts of westward expansion of the United States. There are at least ten unusual aspects of the Mormon migration.”

Stories of the Pioneer Trail

“After making plans to try to sell their property the Saints commenced, in February, to cross the river and turn their faces westward, ready to encounter the hardships and difficulties of the dreary and almost uninhabited regions in which they were going to make their homes.”

Sweeping Everything Before It: Early Mormonism in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey

“The events in this period (1850) mark an important chapter in the history of early Mormonism as well as the history of the Pine Barrens. Perhaps because Historians tent to focus on Mormonism’s main body, this story of a group of Mormons on the periphery has been largely left untold.”

Teen Pioneer: The Adventures of Margaret Judd Clawson

“Margaret Judd, a 17-year-old who crossed the plains with her family in 1849, the year of the gold rush, wrote an account of the experience that is vivid and displays a sense of humor. Margaret was born in Ontario, Canada, where her parents joined the Church when she was five . In Rambling Reminiscences of Margaret Gay Judd Clawson, written 60 years after the trek, Margaret recaptures her interests and impressions as a teenager going to Utah to fulfill her family's dream of gathering with the Saints.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

That We Take All the Saints With Us

“On October 6, 1849, at general conference in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young provided an answer: the Perpetual Emigration Fund (PEF).2 The PEF program provided loans to Saints from other parts of the world to travel to Zion. "The theory of the PEF was that voluntary donations 'would be secured from church members wherever located, and those benefitted by the fund would continually replenish it after their arrival in the Valley.”

Mower, Michael. ""That We Take All the Saints With Us:" The Perpetual Emigration Fund." Pioneer(1999): 4-9.
Keywords: Perpetual Emigrating Fund/ Emigration and immigration

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

The Call of Zion: The Story of the First Welsh Mormon Emigration

“Although a few Welsh Mormons had gone to America on an individual basis after the introduction of the missionary effort into Wales in 1840, those who sailed on the Buena Vista
and the Hartley constituted the first collective emigration from among the Welsh converts.”

Dennis, Ronald D. The Call of Zion: The Story of the First Welsh Emigration. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1987.
Keywords: Emigration and immigration/ Immigrants, Welsh/ Gathering

Permission: Copyright Status/Owner: Brigham Young University

The Capitivity Narrative on Mormon Trails, 1846-65

: “Among the Puritans, Indianization was believed to be a "fate worse than death," rescue tantamount to redemption. They saw the contest as one of passion versus reason, the union of Christian and pagan something akin to the horror of incest or demonic possession, and anyone who preferred captivity to redemption was considered completely degenerate. The record, however, suggests that it did happen. Both Francis Slocum in the eighteenth century and
Mary Jemison in the nineteenth left stirring biographical accounts of their captures, ordeals, and escapes that were very popular.”

“Life and many contributions of these Iowa settlements, Garden Grove, Mount Pisgah, and Kanesville, though temporary in nature, had been over looked. Despite underestimating these way-stations in Iowa, they, and especially Kanesville, located on the Missouri River, became the funnel through which that vast stream of Mormon emigration was routed to Salt Lake Valley. The things which transpired in Iowa have not been fully told and , in the opinion of the writer, justify a more thorough study.”

The Council Bluffs Road: A New Perspective on the Northern Branch of the Great Platte River Road

"In connection with my current project for a comprehensive bibliography of emigrant narratives I have made some rather surprising discoveries that I believe will compel revision of historical thinking about the nature and extent of emigrant travel along the north side of the Platte River.”

The Devil Is Coming': Paddle-Wheelers on the Colorado

“In Early Winter 1852, some Yuma Indians took one look at the strange craft on the Colorado River and ran away in fear. "The devil is coming!" they cried. One of them might even have suggested that this devil was "blowing fire and smoke out of his nose and kicking water back with his feet." These Yumas, or Quechans, had seen various boats on the river before, but never a paddle-wheeler, with its smokestack belching smoke and sparks and its paddle wheel tossing the water into the air.”

The First Handcart Company

A brief account by Phyllis Hardy Ferguson written by Lydia D. Alder about three hundred British Isles saints and their voyage and trek across the plains where they arrived safe and in good health in Salt Lake City, the first handcart company. This lively story recounts the rivalry between the Scots and the English saints and the challenges of the plains, encounters with snakes.

The First Immigrants to Nauvoo

The first foreign mission of the Church began when Heber C. Kimball and associates landed in England July 20, 1837.1 Nine months later there were between 1,500 and 2,000 members of the British Mission. Since that time tens of thousands of converts have immigrated to this country-first to Nauvoo, later to Utah. This flood of immigrants began with a company of forty-one under the direction of Elder John Moon.

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The First Welsh Emigration To Utah (1849)

“It will suffice to say that in 1849 many Welsh Mormons were ready to accompany their leader to Salt Lake City. One of the last undertakings of Dan Jones before he left Wales was to attend the opening ceremony of the Saints' chapel at Llanelly, Carmarthenshire -a building which still stands.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Freiberg Temple: An Unexpected Legacy of a Communist State and a Faithful People

“How did this unusual event come to pass? And why was the government so willing to help? “
“For many observers, economics is the preferred explanation, for the GDR needed the western currency that the Church paid for its construction. For others, it was truly a miracle brought about by the faith of devoted members. For a few, it indicated that their local leaders had become
too friendly with the Communists. This article discusses these and other explanations.”

The Gathering of the Australian Saints in the 1850s

“The doctrine of the gathering made The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unique in colonial Australia, as the missionaries recruited converts to help build their Zion in North America and let a mini-emigration out of the Australian colonies in a period when the tide was flowing into the country.”

The Gathering to Zion—Its Nature and Implications

“A little girl in Sweden plays a game, rocking back and forth in the family rocker: she calls it "going to America." A Danish shoemaker toasts his friends on New Year's Eve: "May the next year find us together in Zion." A Norwegian, released from his labors as a missionary, rejoices in his return to Zion: "My absence has been to me an exile," he wrote. It was all one and the same manifestation: it was the spirit of gathering.”

Christianson, James R. "The Gathering to Zion--Its Nature and Implications." In Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History: British Isles, ed Donald Q. Cannon, 115-31. Provo, UT: Department of Church History and Doctrine, BYU, 1990.
Keywords: Gathering/ Missiology, western Europe/ Europe, western/ Emigration and immigration/ Administrative history, emigration and immigration

Permission: Brigham Young University

The Golden Road! To The Valley 1848-1980

”Up to 60,000 Mormon Pioneers plus additional thousands of soldiers, merchants, gold seekers, Californians, and assorted I I Gentiles', came down Echo Canyon to the Weber River. Most turned north to present day Henefer and into the Valley via Emigration Canyon. But some, including almost every important visitor to Salt Lake City between 1862 and the coming of the railroad in 1869, turned south down The Golden Road to the City of the Saints.”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

The Great Florence Fitout of 1861

“The following account of the 1861 outfittings should demonstrate that the Florence (Nebraska) story deserves mention in tourist literature and history books, as well as its own markers and monuments.”

The Handcart Expeditions

Between 1855 and 1860 groups of poor migrating Mormons traveled 1500 miles from Iowa City to the Great Salt Lake pulling handcarts, two wheeled wagons carrying belongings and food, accompanied by one wagon per 100 migrants. These handcart companies arrived safely with the exception of two, the Martin and Willie companies which suffered extreme hardship and several deaths caused by starvation and freezing snow when an early winter caught them on the plains and in the passes after a late start on their journey.

The Handcart Expeditions: 1856

“At this time the wave of converts bound for Utah had become so great the Mormon church decided it was impossible to provide wagons and oxen to transport all the needy immigrants from Iowa City to Salt Lake City, although the total cost of bringing one of these poor converts from Europe to Utah was only about sixty dollars. Accordingly, in 1855, Brigham Young evolved the plan of having these hundreds of proselytes journey from Iowa City to Salt Lake City on foot.”

The Handcarts of ‘56

“I have been thinking how we should operate another year. We cannot afford to purchase wagons and teams as in times
past, I am consequently thrown back upon my old plan-to make hand-carts and let the emigration foot it, and draw upon them the necessary supplies, having a cow or two for every ten. They can come just as quick if not quicker, and much cheaper, can start earlier and escape the prevailing sickness which annually lays so many of our brethren in the dust.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Heart Of The Continent: A Record Of Travel Across The Plains And In Oregon, With An Examination Of The Mormon Principle

“It was my original intention to have published these notes of my journey in the two-volume form, comprehending much additional material which would have made the work a complete and minute survey not only of the entire region traversed by the Pacific Railroad, but of much of the incalculably valuable and interesting region tributary to it on either side. Of the latter part of my journey, after leaving Salt Lake City, I have here, however, had room to give only the more salient features ; and by the same circumstances which rendered it advisable to reduce the book to a single volume, I have been compelled to throw much of the matter relating to the Mormons, their home, their problem, and their destiny, into what to most readers is the least attractive and most superficially noticed form --- an Appendix.”
“It is principally on behalf of this Appendix that I utter a word of prefatory remark. The engrossing question, " What shall we do with the Mormons?' is, so far as I know from personal reading and information obtained at the best hands, treated in this Appendix from an entirely new point of view. I may say frankly that I believe my solution of the question the promptest, the most feasible, the least productive of violent dislocation and suffering, which has yet been offered. Because I so believe and am desirous to have the fact tested by other minds, and because there is much in the small type at the other end of my book which is full as worthy of the larger typographical honors as anything which precedes it, because, in fine, I think the reader will agree with me in calling the Mormon Matter at least as interesting as the rest of the volume, I here venture to ask that it may be read at least no more superficially than that.”

Ludlow, Fitz Hugh. The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon, With an Examination of the Mormon Principle. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1870.
Keywords: Travelers' accounts, 19th century
Notes: Reprint, New York, AMS Press, 1971. See pp. 278-375; 503-68 ("Appendix: Utah's Life Principle and Destiny.")

The History of Salt Lake and Its Founders

“Prefatory review of the people who founded salt lake city, grand colonizing design of the Mormon prophet It will be well affirmed in history that the Pioneers who founded Salt Lake City, were as the crest of that tidal wave of colonization which peopled these Pacific States and Territories. And the colonies which this wonderful state-founding community has sent to the West, since that tidal wave rose in the exodus from Nauvoo, will stand as the most marked example of organic colonization which has occurred in the growth and spread of the American nation. Other States and cities, which have been founded since the first colonization of America by the Pilgrims of New England, have grown up and increased in their population upon the ordinary laws of national growth, to which has been superadded the promiscuous emigration of Europeans to this country; but not even in the extraordinary case of the growth of the Western States and Territories, excepting that shown by the Mormon people, has there been a spectacle of colonization proper, to mark the history of America in the present century. Thus considered, it is a most unique fact of the age that Salt Lake City was founded by a colony of the strictest type. In most of its leading features, the founding and growth of Utah resembles the founding of the American nation by the Pilgrim colonies, which sailed from England and Holland to establish religious liberty on a virgin continent, driven by the cruel force of persecution, yet whose every exile from the dear mother land became big with the genius of colonization, until the little companies of emigrants who left their native shores, very much in the character of religious outlaws, grew into a galaxy of States. Persecution undoubtedly at the onset drove the Mormons hitherward, as it drove the Puritans to this continent—drove them in fact into the very path of their destiny—but as they came westward from Ohio, where their Zion first rose, they so fast imbibed the genius of colonization, that extermination brought forth in the mind of the Mormon Prophet the grand scheme to colonize the Pacific Slope with his people, and with them form in the West the nucleus of a new galaxy of American Slates.”

The History Of Wyoming From The Earliest Known Discoveries

To tell the story of this wonderful progress, as well as to give accounts of the pre-historic inhabitants, the trappers, traders and early explorers; to keep green the memories of the past : to recount the deeds and achievements of the Wyoming pioneers, that subsequent generations may emulate their worthy examples and profit by their mistakes, is the purpose of this history.

The Iowa Experience: A Blessing in Disguise

“When first upon Iowa soil, the Saints were freezing, rather disorganized, and hungry. Going on an exodus was no picnic, no vacation. They had no time to enjoy the beauty of this “land between the two rivers.” Yet, it was providential that it was to Iowa the Saints came for refuge.”

The Iowa Trek of 1846: The Brigham Young Route From Nauvoo to Winter Quarters

“The famous Mormon pioneer trek from Winter Quarters, Nebraska, to the Salt Lake Valley has tended to overshadow the Mormon march through Iowa. According to Stanley B. Kimball, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Edwardsville, the lesser-known Iowa trek is of crucial importance in LDS history.”

The Journal of Archer Walters

“We here present the Journal of Archer W alters, age 47, English craftsman and son of a well-to-do-family, who, in 1856, brought his wife, and five children between the ages of six and eighteen years, from Sheffield, England, to Utah, by boat, rail and handcart, and who, after having fashioned untimely coffins in which to lay at rest
many of his fellow travelers, himself went to an early grave a fortnight after reaching Salt Lake Valley.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Journey of a Mormon From Liverpool to Salt Lake City

“John Johnson Davies was born December 28, 1831,in Carmarthn, South Wales.”
“We got to Laverpool [Liverpool] on the 2nd. of Feb. 1854• My Father and Mother in law and myself and
my wife started to the valleys of the mountains on the 4th. of February, in the ship Colcondah a sailing vessel, thare was 464 saints on board.”

The Kirtland Temple Suit and the Utah Church

“By all accounts the Mormons considered the Kirtland Temple sacred space. However, that space became polemical as well. In an effort to establish itself as legal successor to the early church and title-holder to the Kirtland Temple, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ) filed a petition in the Court of Common Pleas, in Lake County, Ohio, on August 18, 1879. Among several defendants named in the suit were "The Church in Utah of which John Taylor is President and commonly known as the Mormon Church, and John Taylor, President of said Utah church." Although named as defendants, neither the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints nor John Taylor was represented in the Ohio court. With the potential that the court would rule in favor of the RLDS Church, legally naming it successor and owner of the temple, why would the LDS Church absent itself from this case? Several possible answers to this question constitute the focus of this paper.”

The Latter-Day Saints' Emigrants' Guide

Many works have been published, and maps exhibited for the instruction of emigrants, but none which ever pretended to set forth the particulars contained in this work, so far as regards the route from Council Bluffs to the Great Salt Lake. The distances from point to point are shown as near as a Roadometer can measure; and by this means the traveler can know, each day, the kind of country lying before him, and how far he must go in order to find a suitable place to camp at night.

The Latter-Day Saints' Emigrants' Guide

“Clayton's guide to the Mormon Trail (as distinct from the Oregon Trail) has seldom been appreciated for what it was and is. It needs to be better known and put into proper perspective. His twenty-four-page, pocket-size paperback booklet of 1848 was simply the first practical and best emigrant guide of its day to the great Far West.”

Clayton, William. The Latter-Day Saints' Emigrants' Guide. St. Louis, MO: Chambers & Knapp, 1848.
Keywords: Mormon Trail/ Exodus/ Pioneers of 1847/ Clayton, William, Latter-day Saints' Emigrants' Guide/ Emigration and immigration/ Guidebooks
Notes: (Subtitle: Being a Table of Distances, Showing all the Springs, Creeks, Rivers, Hills, Mountains, Camping Places, and all other Notable Places, from Council Bluffs, to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. . . .) Various reprints. See especially reprint edited by Stanley B. Kimball, with an introduction by James B. Allen (Gerald, MO: Patrice Press, 1983), which contains information about some previous reprints.

Permission: Public domain

The LDS Legacy in Southwestern Iowa

“Many are stunned to discover that the Saints built at least fifty-five widely separated communities and farmed as much as fifteen thousand acres in southwest Iowa alone. One amazed Iowa official said at a Western
Historic Trails Center meeting, "Can you imagine those Mormons building, in less than a month, a log tabernacle [in Kanesville] capable of holding a thousand people?”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Martin Handcart Disaster: The London Participants

Two of the most famous journeys along the Mormon Trail from Liverpool to the Salt Lake Valley had their beginnings in London, England, in the tiny Theobalds Road Branch, founded by Wilford Woodruff and Lorenzo Snow in 1841. The first trek, in 1853, was the lyrical and romantic journey of the Miller Cooley Wagon Train, evocatively sketched by London artist Frederick Piercy; the second, in 1856, was the ill-starred Edward Martin Handcart Company,2 one of the most tragic events in Mormon history.”

The Meaning of the Mormon Migration in American History

“We of today, sensing our debt to our pioneer fathers, never cease honoring them for their courage, their faith, their zeal, and their persistence in carrying the American flag into foreign territory. Because these characteristics of courage and faith are so
worthy of honor and so satisfying to us, we sometimes fail to recognize the real significance, in an international sense, of what they did.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Mormon Crossing of the United States, 1840-1870

“…an attempt to analyze, largely from unpublished sources and from the Mormon periodical, Latter Day Saints' Millennial Star, the organization of the Mormon crossing of the United States from the Atlantic coast to Utah, up to the time when the development of steamship and railway transformed experiment and adventure into routine.”

The Mormon Migrations of 1846-68 in Perspective

“We know much about why and what happened. But, what does it all mean? How important
was the Mormon experience? What is it, in perspective, in relation to the larger whole of
Trans-Missouri migrating experience, including the Oregon and California trail experiences?”

The Mormon Pioneer Trail, 1846-47

“The beginning of the great trek west really commenced 1 March 1846 on the frozen banks of Sugar Creek in Lee County, Iowa , seven miles west of the Mississippi River. On that day approximately three thousand men, women, and children in about five hundred wagons formally abandoned Nauvoo , Illinois, the City of Joseph, as a result of misunderstandings and mob activities. These were the vanguard, but thousands more were to follow that year, across the Mormon Mesopotamia between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. As far as to Bloomfield, at least, the pioneers used established territorial roads . Thereafter they followed what primitive roads and Indian paths there were.”

The Mormon Road

“They had made a wagon road for 1,100 miles through the trackless wilderness. Colonel Thomas Kane in his address in Philadelphia in 1852 said: "The Mormons have laid out for themselves a road through the Indian territory over 400 leagues in length, with substantial, well-built bridges. fit for the passage of heavy artillery over all the streams except a few great rivers where they have established permanent ferries." In the fall of that same year (1847) 566 wagons came over it and in June of the following year 623 wagons,175 horses and mules, and 1,529 oxen and cattle. And within the next three years over 20,000 people came over it to the Salt Lake Valley.
It is impossible to estimate how much the making of that Mormon road contributed to the settling of the West. It is a significant fact that, for a good part of its way, from Omaha to Salt Lake, the Union Pacific Railway runs over the route of the old Mormon road. It aided vastly the great rush to the gold mines of California that immediately followed its completion. It was a great aid to the emigrations to Oregon and Washington of subsequent years. It transformed the dry and barren waste of the Salt Lake Basin into one of the most fertile and beautiful regions of the whole country. and formed a much needed and convenient resting place for everyone of the weary travelers who subsequently went to the Pacific Coast.”

The Mormon Trail Across Nebraska

Two page article about “The Historians of the Mormon Church at Salt Lake City plan an Expedition Next Summer from the Missouri River to Utah, Marking and Mapping the Trail Made by the Earliest Mormon Travelers on the North Side of the Platte River.”

The Mormon Trail Network in Iowa 1838-1863: A New Look

“Up to now interest in and knowledge of Iowa trails have focused largely on the Pioneer Route of 1846 and the Handcart Trail of 1856-1857. But there were many other trails and variants, and we are just now beginning to appreciate the Dimensions and magnitude of Mormon travel in Iowa.”

The Mormon Waldensians

“While en route, in Liverpool, Elder Snow read of the Waldensians, Protestant sectarians who had inhabited the Piedmont region of the Cottion Alps for centuries. He was moved by their long struggle for religious freedom and saw many similarities between their simple doctrines and the "restored'' gospel which he had been commissioned to preach. He felt empathy when he read that the Waldensians, like the Mormons, had suffered severe reli g ious persecution and had
been forced to seek sanctuary in a mountain retreat. Snow felt impressed enough to begin his missionary efforts in Italy among this simple mountain folk.”

The Mormons At Home: With Some Incidents Of Travel From Missouri To California, 1852-1853

“In the summer of 18-52 my husband received from the President an appointment for the territory of Utah, which he was induced to accept. Unwilling to be separated from him, for the length of time he must necessarily be absent, under circumstances involving much anxiety for his safety; I determined to accompany him. We accordingly journeyed to Salt Lake, where we spent the winter; and, in the succeeding spring, returned home by way of California.”
“During our absence, and in compliance with a previous promise, I wrote letters to some near and dear friends, descriptive of our travel and sojourn in Utah. Since our return, I have collected and revised these; letters, as a matter of amusement. Those relating to the journey were written with more or less haste, and under the usual inconveniences of camp life ; I have studied, however, to preserve the passing impressions and reflections, as they actually occurred. In Utah I could not well avoid some intercourse with its female society ; and became, necessarily, conversant with the effect upon it of the more distinctive features of Mormonism.”
“Yielding to the suggestion, that these incidents of travel and impressions of Mormonism may be interesting to the public, I have, with some hesitation, given my letters to the publishers. Ithaca, N. T., Dec, 1855.”

Ferris, Cornelia (Woodcock) [Mrs. Benjamin G. Ferris]. The Mormons at Home: With Some Incidents of Travel From Missouri to California, 1852-3. New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856.
Keywords: Ferris, Cornelia/ Travelers' accounts, 19th century/ Women, pioneer life
Notes: Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971. Originally appeared as a series of letters in Putnam's Monthly, under the title "Female Life Among the Mormons."

Permission: Public domain

The Mormons in Johnston's Army

“In late June 1858, soldiers from the United States Army entered a nearly deserted Salt Lake City. The few residents who remained were in hiding, ready to carry out Brigham Young's order to burn the town's homes and structures if the military disregarded its agreement to continue through the city before establishing its camp. Those with the Utah Expedition-better known as Johnston's Army- took in the scene with great interest, but few with greater interest than 17 -year-old George Harrison and his 21-year-old brother Aaron. Unlike most with this army, these brothers didn't harbor feelings against the Mormons, or hope that their stay in Utah would be short-lived. They were Latter-day Saints themselves, and they had finally come "home."

The Nauvoo Road

“THE Nauvoo Road- ever hear of it? Possibly not, and yet western Ontario, Canada, has a highway called the "Nauvoo Trail" even today, reminiscent of a very early migration of Latter-day Saints from the dominion. I will tell you more of it later; meanwhile, let us recall some of the beginnings of the church in Canada. This will give a necessary background to a hitherto little-known incident in church history.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Pioneer Trek: Nauvoo to Winter Quarters

The Latter-day Saints' epic evacuation from Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846 may be better understood by comparing it to a three-act play. Act 1, the winter exodus, was President Brigham Young's well-known Camp
of Israel trek across Iowa from 1 March to 13 June 1846, involving perhaps 3,000 Saints. Their journey has been researched thoroughly and often stands as the story of the Latter-day Saints' exodus from Nauvoo.1 Act 2, the spring exodus, which history seems to have overlooked, showed three huge waves departing Nauvoo, involving some 10,000 Saints, more than triple the number in the winter departure. Act 3, the fall exodus, has been studied only in part. It involved about 700 Saints, mostly poor, forced from Nauvoo at gunpoint. What follows is an overview of what we now know about these three phases of the 1846 exodus.”

The Place of the Mormons in the Religious Emigration of Britain, 1840-1860

“The natural assumption that religious beliefs were the cause for very few British departures in the nineteenth century fails to weigh the influence religion exerted over early Victorian Britain, an era which not only produced religious leaders like Newman, Manning, Maurice, Kingsley, and Chalmers, but also allowed for the conversion and emigration of thousands of Mormons.”

Shepperson, Wilbur S. "The Place of the Mormons in the Religious Emigration of Britain, 1840-1860." Utah Historical Quarterly 20 (1952): 207-18.
Keywords: Emigration and immigration/ British Isles, 19th century

Permission: Licensed from Utah State History, April 2010

The Power Of Place and the Spirit of Locale: Finding God on Western Trails

“We need to get out of our offices, libraries, ivory towers, and archives and experience the places we write about. It has been my good fortune to follow—on foot, by Jeep, and by plane — fifteen trails through fifteen states, aggregating more than ten thousand miles — much of the time following my ancestors, all the time following my heritage, and often enjoying the sensible power of place and tangible spirit of locale.”
“I have come closer to God on the trails in three ways: though the splendor and order of nature, by way of my pioneer heritage, and by association with my fellow beings.”

Kimball, Stanley B. "The Power of Place and the Spirit of Locale: Finding God on Western Trails." Journal of Mormon History 16 (1990): 2-9.
Keywords: Kimball, Stanley B./ Mormon Trail

Permission: Licensed from Mormon History Association, June 2010

The Provisional Government

”Although the stake presidency and high council functioned as the highest governmental units in Utah until late 1848, two members of the Council of the Twelve Apostles and the Council of Fifty, Parley P. Pratt and John Taylor, came into the Valley in October 184 7 and were regarded as the highest authorities there. Shortly after his arrival, Pratt reminded the stake high council that its laws were only temporary-tl\.at permanent arrangements would be in the hands of the Council of Fifty as soon as its members were present. The Saints, in seeking a sanctuary and self government, found themselves situated on the crossroad of an expanding nation and under it jurisdiction. Already aware that gold had been discovered in California, the leaders of this politico-religious community realistically concluded that there would be an ever-increasing contact with people not of their faith and that the theocratic government would be unacceptable to the nonbeliever.”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

The Psychological And Ethical Aspects Of Mormon Group Life

“It is the purpose of this work to interpret the life-history of the Mormon group in the scientific spirit, and, in so far as the present methods of social and psychological investigation are adequate, to get at fundamental psychological and ethical principles. I realize, however, that the Mormon group life is extremely complex, as is every social unit, and cannot be stated in simple terms. I realize also my own limitations in dealing with the problem. One who has been associated all his life with the Mormon people, as I have been, is sure to have formed prejudices and conceptions which render an objective and impartial study of them extremely difficult. But on the other hand, the inner life of the group, its sentiments, and ideals, can be comprehended only by one who has actually experienced them. I therefore regard myself as justified in attempting to describe and interpret the sentiments which I have to a certain extent experienced in common with the group. In this work I do not pretend to give a detailed account of Mormon history. The accounts of historical events have been purposely reduced to very brief statements in order to give greater prominence to the psychological aspects of the different situations in which the Mormon group was placed. It is the group sentiments with which we are here concerned, and particularly the genetic development of Mormon group consciousness.”

Ericksen, Ephraim E. The Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922.
Keywords: Accommodation/ Identity, sense of/ Mormon group life/ Social and cultural history, 19th century/ Colonization/ Cooperatives/ Church finances/ Ethics/ Plural marriage/ Change/ Accommodation/ Internal conflict, 19th century
Notes: Publication of Ph.D. dissertation by the same title, University of Chicago, 1918. Reprint, with introduction by Sterling M. McMurrin, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1975.

Permission: Public domain

The Rocky Mountain Saints

Notwithstanding the frequency with which the American press has kept the name of the Mormons before the public, few persons have any definite idea of what Mormonism claims to be, and what it actually is. Occupying, as the Saints do, the centre of the great highway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and demanding admission into the Union as a sovereign State, Congress cannot long refuse attention to their claim. The question, therefore, of engrafting upon the Republic a Theocracy which practices polygamy, teaches the barbarous doctrine of human sacrifice, and is in its sentiments inimical to the constitution of the nation, demands the careful consideration of all who are interested in the honour and good name of the United States.

Stenhouse, T. B. H. The Rocky Mountain Saints. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1873.
Keywords: General overviews, 19th century (books)/ Plural marriage/ Exodus/ Pioneers of 1847/ Church-state relations, 19th century/ Emigration and immigration/ Reformation (1856-57)/Handcart companies/ Utah War/ U.S. government, relations with, 19th century/ Plural marriage, legislative history/ Plural marriage, judicial history/ Mountain Meadows Massacre/ Pearl of Great Price, Book of Abraham/ American Civil War/ Salt Lake City, Utah, 19th century/ Mining/ Egyptology
Notes: (Subtitle: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons, from the First Vision of Joseph Smith to the Last Courtship of Brigham Young . . . and the Development of the Great Mineral Wealth of the Territory of Utah. Written by a dissenter.

Permission: Public domain

The Saints and St. Louis, 1831-1857: An Oasis of Tolerance and Security

“Throughout the Missouri and Illinois periods of the Church, up to the coming of the railroad to Utah in 1869 and beyond, St. Louis was the most important non-Mormon city in Church history.”

The Scout Who Rode With God

“Ephraim K. Hanks was a frontier scout who was equipped with good weapons, a bottle of consecrated oil, and faith in God.”
“. . .success of this great migration was made possible by a handful of hardy, brave, resourceful men who stood ready, in all seasons and weather conditions, to lead a pioneer train, supply its members with wild meat, deal with hostile Indians, or ride to the help of a camp in distress. These were the scouts . . .”

A brief history of the ship Brooklyn, which brought a large group of Mormon migrants, led by Sam Brannan, around the Horn to San Francisco, with a few notes about some of the passengers.
“On the bright, breezy afternoon of July 31, 1846, there sailed through the Golden Gate the ship Brooklyn, piloted by Capt. Edward Richardson, who was also part-owner. Aboard were over two hundred peace-seeking, sea-weary, and worried Latter Day Saints, commonly called Mormons. Expert craftsmen with stocks of goods were among them; farmers with domestic animals and equipment; and a few professional men; mainly from the eastern United States. Of the total when they left New York on February 4, 1846, 70 were men, 68 women, and 100 children. But during the voyage there had been spiritual back sliding involving four, death had taken ten, and there were two births.
The leader or presiding elder of the group was Samuel Brannan, a printer by trade. Most Californians have heard about Brannan and his accomplishments, but the details of his first and probably his greatest success, the chartering and managing of the cargo-ship Brooklyn for this important voyage, are less familiar. Born in Saco, Maine, in 1819, Brannan was a large and handsome man, with a forceful personality; and the Brooklyn put him and his fellow-passengers down where they were sure the Lord had sent them. Consequently, many descendants of the Brooklyn pioneers now live to glorify the ship and the voyage though it was a trying experience at times for the voyagers.”

"The Ship Brooklyn."

“City of Joseph [Nauvoo] Sept. 15th, 1845. Dear Brother Samuel Brannan: .. . I wish you together with your press, paper, and ten thousand of the brethren were now in California at the Bay of St. Francisco, and if you can clear yourself and go there, do so. . . Elder Samuel Brannan is hereby appointed to preside over, and take charge of the company that go by sea; and all who go with him will be required to give strict heed to his instruction and counsel. He will point out to you the necessary articles to be taken, whether for food or for raiment, together with farming utensils, mechanical instruments, and all kinds of garden seeds, seeds of various kinds of fruits, &c., &c. Several have already given their names to go with him, and I think he will soon raise a company as large as can conveniently go in one vessel.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Story of Sam Brannan

“The outstanding figure in the historic '49 days of California and the turbulent decade immediately
following was Sam Brannan, a Mormon elder, who rose to the heights, plunged to the depths, redeemed himself and died at peace. His life, presented herewith, is one of the most colorful and interesting in American history.”

The Swiss In Utah: An Introduction

“Beginning in the mid-18.50s, Swiss immigrants, virtually all converts from early successful
Mormon proselyting in their homeland, began arriving in the Utah Territory. They became part of
two larger immigrant streams: one composed of thousands--by the year 1900, some 115,000--of
fellow Swiss who, beginning in colonial times, had found new homes in the United States; and the
other, the so-called "Gathering to Zion," the organized emigration of thousands of European
Mormon converts, mostly from Protestant countries, in the last half of the nineteenth and the first
decades of the twentieth century.”

Permission: Reprinted by permission of the Swiss-American Historical Society

The Tired Mother: Pioneer Recollections

“Betsey Smith Goodwin was born March 7, 1843, in Dundee, Scotland.”
“How well I remember when my mother, Marjorie McEwan Bain Smith, said: "Girls, let us try to go to the Valley next season with the hand carts.”

The Tyrian and Its Mormon Passengers

“Among the early companies of LDS emigrants from Britain was one that embarked from Liverpool aboard the ship Tyrian in mid-September 1841. Unlike many of the later groups whose membership is known to us from Church emigration records or from port-of-entry records,1 the passenger list of the Tyrian can be but partially reconstructed from personal accounts by the emigrants themselves. The intent of this brief study is to examine those
accounts and other records in an effort to provide as complete a list as possible, at the same time establishing the details of their voyage and travels from the docks of Liverpool to Nauvoo on the banks of the mighty Mississippi.”

The Uncommercial Traveler

Excerpt from All Year Round, where it was originally published on pages 444-449, an account of Dicken’s visit to the ship Amazon to observe Mormon immigrants to America. Here he extols their organization and virtue and the pick and flower of England. The full account of this often quoted passage gives the flavor and atmosphere of the English docks and the contrasting Mormon immigrants in a most complimentary light.

Dickens, Charles. "The Uncommercial Traveler." All the Year Round 9 (1863): 444-49.
Keywords: Amazon (ship)/ Ocean travel/ Emigration and immigration/ British Isles, 19th century/ Public image, British Isles/ Dickens, Charles
Notes: Later published as part of Dickens's book by the same title [London: Chapman and Hall, 1866].

Permission: Public domain

The Unusual and Strange on Mormon Trails, 1831-68: A New Look

A paper on the strange and unusual events among the migrating Mormons, such as “domestic, supernatural, the handicapped, and the miscellaneous” gleaned from the many accounts made by the Mormon migrants.

The Voyage of the Amazon: A Close View of One Immigrant Company

“In June of 1863 the Amazon, a passenger ship with 891 Latter-day Saints aboard, set sail from London.
Just before the voyage, many Londoners- government officials and clergymen included-came for a firsthand look at the Mormons and their traveling arrangements. Among the visitors was author Charles Dickens, who spent several hours on board the ship questioning British Mission President George Q. Cannon and quietly observing the Saints.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Voyage of the Ellen Maria, 1853

“. . . the Ellen Maria was of modest dimensions among the ships . . . carrying converts . . .over the Atlantic in that year (1853). . . . She would carry 332 Latter-day Saints in completing this, her third and last voyage.”

"The worst that I had yet witnessed" Mormon diarists cross Iowa in 1846

“The worst that I had yet witnessed” Mormon diarists cross Iowa in 1846
Abstract: “Eliza Snow, who wrote this reminiscence, was among the nearly 20,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who abandoned their homes in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846, following the murder of their prophet Joseph Smith, Jr. in 1844 and subsequent mob violence and persecution. Leaving property and possessions behind, and huddling under insufficient shelter without enough to eat or wear, the Mormons migrated westward across southern Iowa.”

Theirs was the Handcart Way to Zion

“This centennial year will no doubt bring out a wealth of like stories of enduring courage and faith.
Not all the Saints who took the handcart trail did get to the valleys of the mountains. Many of them
lie in unmarked graves along the way. 'iVhat they have bequeathed to us-not alone to the descendants of the
handcart pioneers but to all-is something beyond price, a heritage ever to be treasured.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

They Came by Handcart

“The year 1997 marks the 150th anniversary of the arrival of President Brigham Young's advance, exploratory company into the Salt Lake Valley. Large companies with ox-drawn teams soon followed, and in 1856 the first handcart company began the trek west. Those resolute early Saints followed a route that has become known as the Mormon Trail. Why is it called the Mormon Trail? After all, for the most part, Latter-day Saints were not trailblazers; they followed established routes. The Mormon Trail is named after our people for at least two reasons.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

They Came to Nauvoo

“For a time, many saw it as a refuge from their tiring travels-a symbol of the gathering of the righteous. Their stories are the stories of Nauvoo: the insistent spirit of gathering that brought them to this new Zion, the problems of adjusting to Nauvoo and of making that unhealthy bend in the Mississippi adjust to them, their beloved memories of Joseph Smith in both life and death, the hard-won and dearly cherished temple, and the sorrow of leaving their city behind.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Thirty-Six Miles of History

“With some small variations the Mormon Pioneer Memorial Highway closely follows the route taken by the Mormon Pioneers through the Wasatch Mountains and into Salt lake
Valley. Starting at Henefer the route winds thirty-six miles through the crown of the Wasatch Mountains and ends at the This Is the Place Monument, at the mouth of Emigration Canyon.
From 1847 to 1862. except for a brief period in 1850, when Parley P. Pratt's Golden Pass Road was partially used, this route was the sole means of entrance into the valley from the east. Along this route came all the wagons of the immigrants, the freighters, the Pony Express, and Johnston's Army. Let us start at Henefer and trace those last thirty-six historic miles into Salt lake Valley.”

Thomas E. Ricks

“In the fall of 1845, Thomas E. Ricks, only 17 years old, worked alongside his father and others to complete the temple in Nauvoo, Illinois. In February 1846 as the Saints began their exodus west, he helped some of the first families cross the frozen Mississippi. He participated in the handcart rescue of the Willie and Martin companies.”

To the Saints in England: Impressions of a Mormon Immigrant

“The 10 December 1840 William Clayton letter from Nauvoo to Manchester” Clayton wrote two letters to friends in England describing the trip to Nauvoo which provides rich details of the Mormon emigrant from England experience. Perhaps more important are Clayton’s comments about the Prophet Joseph Smith.

Traveling Over Forgotten Trails

“Other trails, trodden by the feet of men and women as devoted as those who first entered the Salt Lake Valley, are forgotten. No monuments will ever be built to mark their course. The trails are obliterated. The men who made them have passed away. Lest the children forget the sacrifices of the fathers, come and travel with me over some of these forgotten trails.”

Traveling the Honeymoon Trail: An Act of Faith and Love

"The uniqueness of the history of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arizona, however, lies in the courage and the faith that it took to keep all of God's commandments, including eternal marriage. The Arizona Saints desired to do whatever was needed,
risking life if necessary, in order to be married in the Lord's temple."

Two More Mormon Trails

“The Boonslick Trail began as a 1764 lndian-trapper pathway that started in downtown Saint Louis near the Old Courthouse and developed into the first road to the Far West, mother of the better known Santa Fe and Oregon Trails. Because the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone and his sons extended the early trail to some salt springs, an animal " licking" place, in Saline County, the trail is named after him. The Mormons also used it during their 1831-39 sojourn in Missouri, first when Parley P. Pratt and four other missionaries traveled from Kirtland, Ohio, arriving early in 1831 to preach in the Indian Territory just west of the Missouri River. Their work with the Shawnees and Delawares was not successful because of objections raised by the Indian agent and local ministers. But they were the first Mormons in what was soon to become one of the main centers of the new Church- Jackson County, Missouri Joseph Smith himself visited Jackson County during the summer of 1831, walking the entire 240 miles from Saint Louis.”

“In 1856, a crew surveying a new military road across eastern Nebraska left tow maps, a diary and three survey books that clear up misconceptions about the route traveled and the conditions encountered by the LDS handcart emigrants of the same year.”

Under Sail to Zion

“The Britannia, captained by veteran shipmaster Enoch Cook, was typical of many packets of her time-except for one historic difference. She was carrying among her passengers the first organized emigrant company of Latter-day Saints. Elder John Moon presided over these 41 British converts. He had been appointed and set apart for this task by two members of the Quorum of the Twelve, Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball. Under their leadership, the missionaries in the British Isles had achieved remarkable success.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Undeveloped West; Or Five Years In The Territories

“This work is simply a personal record of my five years' travel and residence in the new States and Territories, where I went, what I did, what I saw and what I thought about it. Two points, however, of practical interest I have kept steadily in view : to give carefully arranged facts in regard to the lands still open to settlement; and to correct a number of popular errors in regard to soil and climate. The chapters treating specifically on lands in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Dakota, California, Oregon and Texas, it is hoped, will aid in the first object; in regard to the second object, I have pointed out most of the prevailing errors to call them by no harsher name found in numerous land circulars and railroad reports, and refuted them by a general statement of facts.”

Beadle, John Hanson. The Undeveloped West; Or, Five Years in the Territories. Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1873.
Keywords: Woman suffrage/ Plural marriage/ Young, Brigham, death/ Mountain Meadows Massacre/ Travelers' accounts, 19th century
Notes: Title continues: Being a Complete History of that Vast Region Between the Mississippi and the Pacific, Its Resources, Climate, Inhabitants, Natural Curiosities, Etc. Etc. Life and Adventure on Prairies, Mountains, and the Pacific Coast.... Several chapters deal with Mormons.) Expanded edition titled Western Wilds, and the Men Who Redeem Them. An Authentic Narrative, Embracing an Account of Seven Years Travel and Adventure in the Far West; Wild Life in Arizona; Perils of the Plains; Life in the Canon and Death on the Desert...Adventures Among the Red and White Savages of the West...the Mountain Meadow Massacre; the Custer Defeat; Life and Death of Brigham Young, etc. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers & Company, 1878. Other editions followed. Expanded edition titled Western Wilds, and the Men Who Redeem Them. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers & Company, 1878. Other editions followed.

Permission: Public domain

Utah As A Melting Pot For The Nations

Read at the convention of the Genealogical Society of Utah held in San Francisco, California, July 27, 1915, in connection with the International Congress of Genealogy.
A few months ago a traveler passing through the fertile Utah valley in a luxurious Pullman car, on his way to the Golden State, volunteered to say, as he looked out over the cultivated fields and blooming orchards : "No wonder Brigham Young chose these well watered and beautiful valleys as a permanent home for your people."
It was the spring of the year; the fields were green with the grain of the summer's harvest; the fruit trees along the way were in full bloom and everywhere, in a land of great fertility, appeared the glorious prospect of an abundant yield. Such remarks are often made by those who hurriedly pass through our State and see conditions as they are today. How very little do they know of the early history of our State, and the almost super-human struggle of the Pioneers to make "the wilderness and the solitary place glad for them," and "the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose."

Utah in Her Western Setting

"This book is designed primarily for young people
of public school age who are studying Utah history. The
purpose of the volume is to give a sweep of Utah history
from the arrival of the first white men in Utah up to the
year 1943. Conscious effort was made to keep the book
from becoming too detailed and at the same time to tell
the story of the principal events of Utah's history. Of
necessity some historical facts had to be omitted."

Voyage of the Brooklyn

“On July 31, 1846, a weary company of about 220 Latter-day Saints passed through the rocky portals of the Golden Gate, anticipating the end of a difficult six-month voyage that took them around the southern tip of South America, Cape Horn. While thousands of dedicated Mormon pioneers struggled to make their way across Iowa to Council Bluffs, this bold company of "Water Saints" also experienced the hardships of pioneer life.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

Voyage of the Ship "Brooklyn"

“I am requested to name the moving cause that sent the ship Brooklyn, loaded with "Mormons," from New York to California, by way of Cape Horn, in 1846; what were the incidents by the way, and what has been the result.”

Voyage On The Ship International

“When the large sailing vessel was tugged oceanward into the River Mersey from Liverpool on
February 25, 1853, she carried on board a Latter-day Saint emigrant company of 425, including a number of unbaptized friends and relatives , plus a crew of twenty-six. Hail and snow pelted the ship as it anchored in the Mersey awaiting fair
winds.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

"We Had a Very Hard Voyage for the Season": John Moon’s Account of the First Emigrant Company of British Saints

“The letter which follows is John Moon’s account of that voyage written to William Clayton, and is, so far as we know, the earliest document available telling the story of a trans-Atlantic voyage of Mormon emigrants.”

Moon, John. "'We Had a Very Hard Voyage for the Season': John Moon's Account of the First Emigrant Company of British Saints."James B. Allen. BYU Studies 17 (1977): 339-41.
Keywords: Immigrants, English/ Moon, John/ Ocean travel

Permission: Owner: Brigham Young University

Weather Disaster and Responsibility: An essay on the Willie and Martin Handcart Story

“The disaster that befell the Willie and Martin handcart companies and an analysis of what was responsible for that disaster will be the focus of this essay.”

West From Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of the Immigrant Trails Across Utah 1846-1850

“Through the medium of the basic documents, diaries, and journals, this work for the first time identifies all the routes of 1846 across Utah; it prints for the first time in English or direct from the manuscript the most significant part of the Lienhard diary, which will eventually come to be regarded as one of the classic diaries of overland travel. It presents a wealth of new information about the Donner party on the Hastings Cutoff of such character that every book about the Donner party ever written from 1848-1950 now requires to be rewritten; and it explores and identifies in detail the trails across Utah used by the Forty-Niners.”

Westward Ho!

“He (Brigham Young ) knew what he had heard from travelers and mountain men and explorers, but there was only the maps which John C. Fremont had made in his travels and the journal of Escalante. The general consensus of opinion of the world at that time is best expressed by Daniel Webster in 1830: "What do we want with this vast worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of desert, of shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or these endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their bases with eternal snow? I will never vote one cent from the Public Treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it now is.)
Very few people who had gone west and come back had anything very good to say about the area west of the Missouri River. They described it as being mostly desert and high mountains with extremes of heat and cold, storms and lack of ground that could be cultivated or water to irrigate with. It didn't sound promising. Yet Brigham Young knew that somewhere out there was a valley that he would lead his people to where they, hopefully, would be safe from the influences, persecutions, and condemnations of the world. A place where they could build up their "Zion" according to God's commandments and their own hard work.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, November 2010

When Men and Mountains Meet: Pioneer Life in Utah’s Ogden Valley

“This paper details the special challenges of topography and climate that faced Ogden Valley’s early settlers and examines how these factors affected pioneer life and culture there. I will conclude with some preliminary observations on two other factors that affected pioneer life in the valley—Native Americans and various forms of wildlife. My intent is not so much to show
the effect the Saints had on their physical and cultural environments but rather to show the effects the environment had on the Saints.”

Why Did British Mormons Emigrate?

“Confronted by a movement of emigrants who claim to have been actuated by religious motives, the modern scholar, not himself a member of the sect involved, almost is irresistibly tempted to try to get behind what he regards as appearances and to find the "real," by which he usually will mean the social and economic, basis of action.”

William Clayton's Journal

Clayton, William. William Clayton's Journal. Salt Lake City: Clayton Family Association, 1921.
Keywords: Mormon Trail/ Clayton, William/ Exodus/ Pioneers of 1847/ Diaries and journals, male
Notes: (Subtitle: A Daily Record of the Journal of the Original Company of "Mormon" Pioneers from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.)

Permission: Public domain

William Weeks, Architect of the Nauvoo Temple

“The Nauvoo Temple is well known to students of the LDS Church history, but the structure’s architect, William Weeks, has slipped into obscurity. Yet he deserves to be better known today, not that he was a great architect outside his group and time, but because he helped to translate the purposes and ideals of the early Latter-day Saints into architectural terms and because his work represented the zenith of temple-building activities during the lifetime of the Prophet Joseph Smith.”

"Winter Quarters" is Immortalized in Stone

“On September 20, 1936, thousands of members and non-members of t h e Church gathered at Florence, Nebraska, to participate in the dedication at "Winter Quarters" cemetery of the heroic monument which will immortalize in stone the sacrifice of the men and women who gave life itself for their right to believe and worship
according to the Gospel of the Master.”

Permission: Licensed from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Women Among the Wagons

“The Mormon migration to the Salt Lake Valley was usually a family project. Women and children had important parts to play in the journey. Sometimes women were partners with their husbands in getting the family to Utah. Other times they were temporarily heads of families who later joined their husbands at the end of the trail.” “Often women became permanent heads of families when their husbands died or refused to follow the Church into the desert. Single women often traveled as temporary members of other families for the journey. Many of these were young girls who hoped to be reunited with family members in the Valley. The reminiscences and journals of these women give us interesting details concerning life on the plains.”

Permission: Licensed from National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, April 2010

Wreck of the Julia Ann

Of the 335 Mormon immigrant companies crossing the ocean to America, only one shipwrecked with loss of life among the Mormon passengers. This article is an account of that event on a voyage from Sydney, Australia to California.

Wyoming: Pathway of the Mormon Pioneers to Utah

“The Mormon pioneers were to immortalize this roadway by undertaking the greatest trek in history. They were to add to its name, "Mormon Trail" and leave on the plains and mountain passes of Wyoming landmarks and shrines cherished today as an integral part of that historic march to Utah.”

"You Had the Alps, but We the Mount of Olives": Mormon Missionary Travel in the Middle East (1884–1928)

“Constant and difficult travel was, indeed, a central characteristic of missionary life in the Middle East during the period under investigation (1884-1928). From the missionaries’ diaries and correspondence with Church periodicals (particularly the Millennial Star, the Deseret Evening News, and the Deseret Weekly), distinct patterns of travel experience can be discerned.
These patterns will be examined in this article.”

"You Nasty Apostates, Clear Out": Reasons for Disaffection in the Late 1850s

“What was true of the West in general was also true of the Mormon kingdom in its midst. This paper focuses on why some Mormon settlers abandoned their religion and homes in Utah between 1856 and 1859 to move on once more.”

Young John Taylor

“John Taylor, prophet and Apostle, had Indeed traveled far in both space and circumstance since he had been that little boy in the north of England. Yet the experiences of his childhood and youth there remained with him, for they had helped to shape and mold the character, mind, and body of the man who was now recognized as such a powerful leader and articulate defender of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”